He tried calling the ship. “Malta Base, this is Foxtrot Two. Do you read? Over.” The reply was faint.
“Foxtrot Two, this is Malta Base. I just barely read you.”
Shepard explained that his navigational aids were “erratic” and he might need assistance. The ship couldn’t find him on its radar and asked, “Do you wish to declare an emergency?”
Shepard did not reply, and the ship asked again: “Do you wish to declare an emergency?”
“No,” he said, knowing what a declared emergency—and a lost plane—might do to his record and his reputation. Declaring an emergency means I can’t handle my airplane without help. To admit that means I failed. It means I can’t fix my own problem.
“No emergency, Malta Base. I want to try a couple of things. I’ll get back to you.”
The famous French combat pilot and poet Antoine de Saint-Exupéry—who disappeared in a storm during a reconnaissance mission—likened the feeling of being lost in a storm to being “alone before the vast tribunal of the tempestuous sky.” Saint-Exupéry, who delivered mail from Spain to Africa before World War II, wrote often of such moments, when “fog and sand and sea are confounded in a brew in which they become indistinguishable, when gleaming flashes wheel treacherously in these skyey swamps.”
At such times, the pilot “purges himself of phantoms at a single stroke [and] brings sanity into his house.” And that’s what Shepard did. He ignored the “black dragons and the crowned crests of a coma of blue lightnings” and settled down.
Flying to the spot where he thought the ship should have been, he turned left, and left again, and again. He flew in ever-expanding boxes, each box a little bit wider than the last—a textbook search pattern. Dropping low over the water to improve his visibility, he was burning fuel at a horrendous rate.
As he turned into one of his squares, he saw a dim red light ahead. He flew nearer and through his rain-spattered windscreen saw the Oriskany ’s faint outline emerge in the darkness. His final fear was that the plane’s electrical problems would prevent him from lowering the landing gear. But three green lights on the control panel assured him that the wheels were down.
The ship pitched and yawed in the rough sea. At 888 feet long, the Oriskany was nearly 100 feet shorter than Shepard’s previous carrier, the FDR. Subtract from that the front half of the deck, where the rest of the Oriskany’s planes were parked, and the actual landing area of the ship was about as long as a football field and half as wide. In the seven years since Shepard’s first carrier landing, he had nailed that tiny runway scores of times without incident. But never before had it looked so faint, nor had it bucked and heaved so violently.
To complicate matters even more absurdly, Shepard had less than five minutes of fuel left as he neared his ship. He had only one shot at making the landing.
Through the heavy rain and “scud clouds” he could barely make out the dim, lighted profile of the brave LSO who was standing on the Oriskany’s tail. His one final concern was that the electrical problem had jammed the jet’s tailhook, which should have been lowered from the jet’s tail, ready to grab one of the arresting wires. To make sure the tailhook caught, he slammed down hard onto the deck, the force of it jarring his teeth and bones. Then came the satisfying shove forward as the tailhook snagged a cable. He roared to himself as the plane came to a stop.
Climbing out of his plane, Shepard strutted across the soaking wet deck, straight toward the ready room, and joked that it was just a “normal carrier landing.” Later, Shepard admitted to his squadronmate John Mitchell that it was the first and only time he’d thought he was done for. “It scared the pee out of him,” Mitchell recalled.
Years later, when asked about the highlights of his piloting career, Shepard said without hesitation that flying on and off carriers at night “was the hardest kind of flying I’ve ever done or ever expect to do . . . It’s what separates the men from the boys.”
Colors also separated man from boy aboard a Navy aircraft carrier.
Brown or black—one or the other was the shoe color of every man on the ship—immediately identified the wearer as somebody or nobody. More than 90 percent of the three thousand men aboard the Oriskany wore black shoes. Aviators wore brown, and the term “brown shoe” was nearly equivalent to “sierra hotel”—shit hot. “Black shoes,” meanwhile, were looked down on. The aviators sometimes called them just “shoes.”
But there was an even hotter color than brown. Blue belonged to the uniforms and the jets of the men who performed maneuvers few other Navy pilots were allowed to fly. They snapped and rolled and looped and spun. They were called the Blue Angels, and every brown-shoe Navy man harbored a secret desire to be one of them. Shepard did little to hide his desire to be blue.
The Navy had created the stunt-flying Blue Angels in 1949, and for years Shepard nurtured a simmering envy of the studs chosen to be the Navy’s stunt men. Once, while ashore in Spokane, he and Frank Repp watched a Blue Angels performance, and afterward Shepard asked Repp to introduce him to the leader of the Angels, Ray Hawkins, with whom Repp had previously served. “He always wanted to be one of them,” Repp recalled. “He just liked being around them.”
In late 1953, one of Shepard’s colleagues—the commander of a sister squadron in Air Group 19—had been picked to become the new leader of the Blue Angels, and Shepard wrote to Doc Abbot and Turner Caldwell, asking them to help get him a gig as an Angel, too. But the Navy crushed Shepard’s dream when it decided in 1954 to start using the acrobatic team as a recruitment device and to allow only naval aviation cadets to become Blue Angels. The reasoning was that young men, with dreams of someday becoming an Angel, would want to join the cadets.
Shepard’s response was not to sulk or complain, but to turn around and surreptitiously organize his own acrobatic team, comprised of the Oriskany’s best flyers. He chose his friend and mentor Bob Elder, young Billy Lawrence, John “Mitch” Mitchell, and Preston “Spook” Luke. With Jig Dog’s reluctant permission, they became a poor man’s Blue Angels and during lulls in the schedule practiced formations, wingovers, and loops. Once they were proficient enough, Jig Dog even let them put on a few shows for visiting guests. In time, they earned the nickname Mangy Angels. They performed many of the same maneuvers as the Blue Angels, “except we took a few liberties the Blue Angels couldn’t,” Elder recalled.
They’d fly straight at each other and, at the last fraction of a second, twist 45 degrees left into a knife edge and pass canopy to canopy, with just a few feet between them. They’d fly horizontally past the ship, slam into a chandelle (a maneuver with a sharp left or right twist and then a climb), shoot straight up like rockets, let their jets coast to a stop, and then tumble back toward earth like a wounded bird before kicking in the thrusters again and soaring back to the sky. “It got a little dicey,” Elder said. “I wouldn’t do it with any old pilot.”
One Sunday afternoon the Mangy Angels performed for the entire Pacific task group. Cruisers, destroyers, and carriers lined up at sea to watch the acrobatics. “The star of the show was Alan Shepard,” Charles Griffin, the Oriskany’s captain, said later. “He was a magnificent pilot and he really put on a show.”
Once, the Mangy Angels made plans to get a photograph of themselves flying vertically in a four-plane diamond formation with Japan’s Mount Fujiyama in the background. They envisioned making the cover of Life magazine, or at least the Naval Aviation News. They took off from the Japanese air station at Atsugi, flew a couple of practice loops, then headed south toward Mount Fuji. John Romano, one of the ship’s photographers, followed behind in the backseat of another Banshee. As the four-plane formation prepared to go vertical, with Shepard in the lead, they called to make sure Romano was ready. His response was garbled gibberish. They called him again but got no answer. Finally Romano radioed back that something had come up and he was headed back to Atsugi. When the other four landed, he confessed that he’d gotten sick in his oxygen mask. “We were very disappointed
,” Bill Lawrence said many years later. “Because the country was probably denied the greatest aerial photograph in history.”
When the Korean War ended, the Navy cut costs by taking many planes off the carriers and leaving them ashore. It was cheaper to fly in and out of an airbase, so the Oriskany regularly parked on the shores of one of America’s World War II enemies, Japan. After that war the Navy had taken over the port town of Yokosuka, south of Tokyo, and turned it into a massive military base. Shepard and his pals spent much of their free time in that infamously seedy harbor town, one of the great havens of drunkenness and debauchery, a sailor’s dream port, a cheap and X-rated Disneyland.
It was familiar ground for Shepard, who had visited Yokosuka a decade earlier, in the dying days of World War II. But by 1954 a sprawling naval shipyard had grown around the harbor. It had a well-known officers’ club, the Clover Club, which was often full of attractive young “DACs”—Department of the Army, civilians. Beyond the shipyard, amid the wooden structures of the low hillsides, lay a town of hoods, hustlers, and whores.
For months, the all-male city of the Oriskany had been at sea, with no taste of romance except maybe a girlie magazine and a rare private moment in the showers. Young men bubbled into Yokosuka, an explosion of bar hopping and beer swilling. And if you happened to find a knowledgeable cab driver, he’d take you to the Green Eyes, Club Denen, the Casbah, and Mama-san’s. For an extra few yen, he’d take you further.
Yokosuka’s shopping district wasn’t the only place where things came cheap. Bargains were also found crowded along the dirt roads at the edges of town, in the “hotsy” bathhouses and geisha houses, neon-lit clubs like the White Hat, and the bordellos, where a kimono-clad girl would meet you out front and invite you inside. “Guys would go there like flies,” one sailor recalled of his days on liberty at Yokosuka. “For a carton of cigarettes, you could be king.”
The Oriskany’s crew spent so much time in port that Captain Griffin worried that his men—especially Air Group 19— would all become infected with venereal disease. He threatened to call a “short-arm” inspection so that the ship’s doctor could check every man’s geisha-befriended penis. Jig Dog intervened, telling Griffin that if he forced his men to submit to such an inspection, he’d have to check Jig Dog’s “short arm,” too—and his own. Griffin called off the inspection.
In ports such as Yokosuka, the code among the brotherhood of naval aviators was to look the other way, don’t ask questions, and mind your business. How a man behaved in port was his affair. It had nothing to do with the family back home. It was, in some ways, part of the job—an entitlement after serving months on a ship full of men.
Shepard was no different. In fact, he enjoyed himself more than most of his peers in ports such as Yokosuka, downing cocktails, smoking cigarettes, and meeting women. Friends called him a “snake,” a “roué,” and a “liberty hound.” He’d stay out late, night after night, then get up and do three flawless hops in his Banshee. But few could recall seeing him drunk. When he and a group of pilots went out for the night, Shepard had no interest in chugging beers at the bar. He was a man with a plan, and the plan was to meet some attractive woman. Shepard’s Mangy Angels partner Mitch Mitchell said Shepard, relying on some “inner sense,” could scope out a bar crowd and “pick out just the right one.” It might take one drink, it might take all night, but more often than not he’d walk out with her. “He never said a word, never bragged,” Mitchell said. “You never knew what happened. His lips would peel back from those big beautiful teeth and he’d just smile. Shep never revealed anything—where he went or who he screwed.”
Shepard was hardly an anomaly of the 1950s. Alfred Kinsey’s pioneering study Sexual Behavior in the Human Male found that 80 percent of successful businessmen cheated on their wives. At the time, new icons of masculinity and sexuality were replacing old ones. The subtle charms of Cary Grant got swept aside by the raw sexual energies of Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Elvis Presley shaking his ass on TV. A young man named Hugh Hefner had begun publishing a magazine that, in addition to pictures of beautiful nude women, told men how to mix a cocktail, buy a sports car, have fun. Within three years, nearly a million men subscribed to Playboy.
Men and women were breaking free all over America at the time. The Beat poets and comedian Lenny Bruce began breaking new ground with their words; women (helped by the pill) began expanding their own sexual boundaries. And men like Alan Shepard, who had watched their Depression-scarred fathers deny themselves and who had survived World War II and the Korean War with their optimism and virility intact, began to break free of the old cultural and moral restrictions, to convince themselves that forbidden pleasures were their due. It seemed to some peers that he simply couldn’t help himself. When Shepard wasn’t flying, he was chasing.
“The other women in his life were significant,” said former academy roommate Bob Williams. “They were always there.”
Then again, some colleagues considered Shepard an otherwise devoted spouse. “I know it sounds contradictory, but I think Shep was a good husband,” said former academy classmate and test pilot Bill Botts, who attributed the philandering not to a bad marriage but “because he had more wild seeds in him than most people.”
Shepard’s duality gave some colleagues whiplash. He didn’t talk much about his wife and kids, and they’d be shocked to see him at family events, attentive and respectful with Louise, playful and fatherly with his two daughters.
And while some of Louise’s friends wondered why she stayed with him, she knew about and apparently accepted what was happening. She may have pretended at times that Alan was different. But she wasn’t stupid—she knew. Still, they tried, really tried, to be a family. The deep and complicated truth was this: Alan loved Louise and she loved him. If his indulgences hurt her, she kept it to herself and created a selfless role as her husband’s anchor. Without her, he might have gone off in who knows what reckless directions. Louise grounded Alan. She was his tether to earth.
With his impressive performances in port, his Mangy Angels exploits, and his precision flying, Shepard became a celebrity aboard the USS Oriskany. He did calisthenics and sometimes jogged on the flight deck to keep fit. He could give an hour long lecture on the intricacies of some aircraft without any notes. One night, he took a Banshee up to fifty thousand feet and dove straight down toward the Philippines, intent on pushing the plane beyond Mach 1; he knew the Banshee wasn’t built for such speed, but he still managed to reach Mach .93, more than 600 miles an hour.
He was a natural and had what pilots call “situational awareness.” Like a basketball star who knows intuitively where everyone is on the court at all times, Shepard had a keen, bird’s eye sense of the space around him—where the other planes were, where the ship was, how fast and high he was flying, how much fuel he had left. Most pilots keep a “check-off list” on their knee, which is like a to-do list to remind them to put all the switches and handles in the right position. Shepard never used one, and once scoffed when he learned that Mitchell religiously used his. “You use a check-off list?” he asked after a cross-country flight with Mitchell.
Shepard patiently shared his knowledge with eager, younger flyers but could cut someone to ribbons if he sensed incompetence. He hid his emotions and kept his distance from those who wanted to become friends, seeming not to need or even want that kind of relationship. And yet, while he liked being alone, in a crowd he was graceful and swaggering and funny and smart.
He was the Oriskany’s own movie star, and when some real celebrities came aboard, his friends weren’t surprised to learn that Shepard had befriended a few of them. To avoid paying union wages to extras and stuntmen back home in Hollywood, Paramount Studios convinced the Navy to let it shoot a film aboard the Oriskany, where it would be freed from union restrictions. The Bridges at Toko-Ri, based on James Michener’s bestselling novel of the previous year, would become one of the more famous depictions of Korean War dogfights. It starred Wil
liam Holden as an aging fighter pilot and Mickey Rooney as a daring young helicopter pilot.
Captain Griffin had some reservations about Rooney, who was known as a real wild man when he got drunk. But Griffin didn’t allow alcohol on his ship and felt sure that Rooney would behave in the absence of booze. A few days into the shooting, he even came to like Rooney, who performed for two and a half hours one night in the hangar bay, playing drums and telling jokes for the Oriskany’s crew. When the ship docked in Japan, though, and the crew went ashore, Rooney “got a few drinks under his belt and he was just a little stinker first class.”
During the filming, there was a lot of juggling of airplanes. The planes, flown by Navy aviators, waited on other nearby aircraft carriers until their cue from the movie’s director, Mark Rob-son. The planes would then approach and land on the Oriskany, with Robson’s cameras rolling. One of the pilots was one of Shepard’s former Naval Academy classmates, Bill Geiger. After landing and parking his plane, Geiger roamed around the ship until he found Shepard, and they made plans to meet that night in Shepard’s room.
When Geiger arrived in Shepard’s cramped, cluttered state-room, Shepard had a small cocktail party waiting. He’d set up a folding table covered with a tablecloth and put out some hors d’oeuvres—cheese, crackers, nuts—some paper plates and napkins, and, despite the captain’s no-alcohol-on-the-ship rule, a cocktail shaker. Shepard beamed with pride at his little unauthorized happy hour and mixed them each a martini—straight up, with olives. They were sipping their drinks when there was a loud knock on the door.
“Enter,” Shepard called, and in stumbled Mickey Rooney and another member of the cast. Rooney had clearly found another happy hour somewhere. He was bombed.
Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman Page 18
