Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman

by Neal Thompson

  One of the first stops was a General Dynamics plant in San Diego, where the reticent Gus Grissom was scheduled to give a short speech. Shorty had offered to write the speech for Grissom, but he had declined, which made Shorty nervous. Standing before the eighteen thousand men and women who were building the Air Force’s Atlas rockets, Grissom quieted the crowd, stepped to the microphone, took a breath, and said, “Do good work.”

  That was it. He sat down, and for a few moments everyone was silent. Then the crowd began applauding, and the noise grew to a roar. They loved it, and afterward the workers would adopt Grissom’s entire speech as their motto: Do good work.

  Shepard, meanwhile, had learned—probably from John Glenn’s performance in that first press conference—that a few words went a long way. While Grissom was giving his three-word speech in San Diego, Shepard was led on an orientation tour at Inglewood Ballistic Missile Division, a sprawling factory of steam-spewing pipes and rumbling machinery south of Los Angeles. He strutted through the belching factory, the sleeves of his short-sleeved shirt rolled up shorter, a cigarette dangling from his lips, enjoying himself. Later, at an afternoon press conference up at Edwards Air Force Base—where Shepard had twice nearly killed himself—he decided to out-Glenn John Glenn.

  Shepard, Scott Carpenter, Shorty Powers, and three NASA officials sat to answer reporters’ questions, but the other five could barely squeeze in a sentence. Shepard, relaxed and convivial, pounced on each question. Just as he had learned to speak with authority to younger aviators, he peppered his remarks with definitive and haughty qualifiers. “As a matter of fact,” he’d start, or “Qualitatively speaking . . .” One of NASA’s public affairs officers later remarked, “You literally couldn’t shut him up.”

  When someone asked if the press would be invited for the first flight, Shepard said they could come—“in the nose cone!” When asked what the other six astronauts would do after one was chosen to fly first, Shepard said they would probably “fall on our swords.” He talked about training for zero gravity—“a very comfortable sensation”—and NASA’s new astro-food in a tube— “chopped beef . . . very tasty.”

  Shepard the press-hater was downright garrulous. “I can’t help but remember how talkative Shepard was those days,” recalled NASA press officer Paul Haney. “He talked his head off at the press conferences.” Haney wasn’t the only one to notice that while Glenn’s star shone brightest at the first press conference, “after that, Al outdistanced John.”

  That weekend, at the Society of Experimental Test Pilots (SETP) convention in L.A., jokes about Spam and monkeys got tossed about at loud and smoky preconvention cocktail parties in the lobby bar of the Beverly Hilton. The astronauts mingled through the testosterone-spiked room, sipped whiskey with the nation’s best flyers, laughed, and tried to shrug off the taunts. But it was getting really annoying. Deke Slayton was scheduled to give a speech the next day about the progress of the space program, and that night in the barroom he decided he’d use the podium to defend himself and his new colleagues.

  “I’ve had about all the monkey shit talk I can stand,” he said.

  In the crowded auditorium, with the smell of cigarettes and last night’s booze hanging sickly in the air, Slayton—who hated public speaking—cleared his throat and then announced that he wanted to clear up some “misconceptions” that had been perpetrated by some “military skeptics.” He reminded the crowd of his peers that it takes more than a “college-trained chimpanzee” or the “village idiot” to prepare for a space flight, which got the crowd laughing. No, he acknowledged in a pointed rebuttal to Yeager, flying a space capsule isn’t like flying a jet. The astronaut role is more important and complex than that. It was the role of the explorer into a dangerous, unknown frontier.

  Slayton didn’t have to mention what the press had already reported: that some scientists worried deeply that the human body was incapable of adapting to the zero gravity of space, that their eyeballs would ooze, they’d go blind, they’d go insane.

  The only person prepared to face such risks, Slayton said, was “a highly trained experimental test pilot.” To send anyone of lesser technical ability would be foolish. “If you eliminate the astronaut, you concede that man has no place in space,” he said. “I hate to hear anyone contend that present-day pilots have no place in the space age.”

  At the end of Slayton’s stern half-hour speech, his peers rose into a standing ovation, which temporarily doused the Spam comments.

  On most such trips in which the seven astronauts traveled together, they had quickly learned to pair up two to a room, and often fought over who’d get the fourth bedroom to themselves— or at least not have to share a room with Schirra or Slayton. Shepard and the others had discovered that Schirra had a habit of talking in his sleep, which was even more annoying because he never finished his sentences. Glenn once recalled, with frustration, how Schirra would start talking about how “this girl . . . came over to me . . .” but then trail off into mumbles.

  Sharing a room with Slayton was to be avoided at all costs. The man’s monstrous snores—“major-noise, high-decibel, world-class snoring,” Glenn called them—could rattle pictures off the walls.

  But on this trip to California they didn’t have to worry. Slayton got so drunk after his speech—tossing back Rusty Nails and Salty Dogs—that he flopped into bed and passed out. The others rolled him onto a metal-framed cot and carried the cot out a second-floor access door onto the top of the Beverly Hilton’s neon marquee, where Slayton slept until dawn. He woke up early the next morning with the sun shining in his bloodshot eyes, the traffic noise from Wilshire Boulevard pounding in his ears.

  They may not have been Spam, but the astronauts still knew—as every hard-drinking flyboy should—how to act like monkeys.

  In the summer of 1960 the astronaut show moved south. The astronauts and the entire NASA workforce (which was growing fast, fed by an increasingly steady supply of cash from Congress) had emerged from infancy into adolescence, and NASA decided to move everyone closer to where the real work would happen: the launch pads of Cape Canaveral. The engineers went first, then the astronauts, and then, of course, the press.

  Just south of the Cape, lazing on either side of the two-lane Highway A1A, sat the raggedy little town of Cocoa Beach. Until the astronauts roared into town, Cocoa Beach was a faded and paint-peeling stepchild to its glitzy Art Deco cousin to the south, Miami Beach. Until the astronauts electrified the place, Cocoa Beach was roughly six thousand people—just 823 registered voters—patronizing a few tiki bars, three seafood restaurants, several souvenir stands, some neon-encrusted bait shops, and motels of faded pastel pinks and aquamarines. The narrow strip of land was bordered by the Atlantic Ocean on the east and the Banana River on the west; across a thin inlet to the north was the off-limits elbow of the Cape. It wasn’t quite seedy. It had a nice beach of white-sand dunes. But neither was it a destination for Mom, Dad, and the kids, what with the mosquito-infested palmetto brush and thick tangles of mangrove. “A stringbean of a town,” one writer called it, “a spit of sand.” At low tide, when the wind was blowing south across the swampy mud flats of Turnaround Basin, Cocoa Beach reeked of dankness and rot.

  The arrival of the astronauts, however—and the thousands of engineers, technicians, electricians, doctors, and nurses, and then the reporters, cameramen, and photographers—would transform lazy little Cocoa Beach into a high-tech boom town and a rocking, rollicking hot spot. The young engineers and their families built homes, schools, churches. Narrow streets became choked with commuters, and the smells of cocoa butter, cigarettes, and beer overpowered the stench of Turnaround Basin.

  At night the strip came alive. Patrons swarmed to the newly sprung clubs of A1A, where Caribbean dancers did the limbo, jugglers juggled, and Tahitian belly dancers traded time onstage with folk-singing chanteuses in cowgirl garb. A life-sized pink elephant beckoned from out front of the Carnival Club, and strippers lured men into back-alley clubs. Top
jazz musicians and comedians began adding Cocoa Beach to their tours—Dave Brubeck at the Koko, confetti-throwing comedian Rip Taylor at the Starlight. The Starlight also boasted a sexy, space-themed dance act called “Girls in Orbit.” The Mosquito Coast, for the moment, became the Platinum Coast, home to the latest American melodrama, an East Coast, space-themed Hollywood.

  Over the next few years, surrounding Brevard County would become the fastest-growing county in the nation—the Silicon Valley of its era. It would also soon claim the highest annual liquor consumption in the nation—$143 worth per person. It was maybe no surprise, then, that Cocoa Beach later gained notoriety as home of America’s highest divorce rate. “A harlot of a town,” one visiting British journalist sneered.

  Foreplay to the Cocoa Beach love fest actually began a few years earlier, in the late 1950s, when the Cape became the post-Sputnik launch pad for America’s imperfect experimental rockets, most of which flopped into the Atlantic or exploded. Howard Benedict, a reporter with the Associated Press, happened to be working the night of October 4, 1957, when Sputnik gut-punched America’s psyche. An editor assigned an “interpretive” piece for the weekend, even though Benedict “didn’t even know what a satellite was.” He wrote a story about Sputnik being the first step toward sending a man to the moon, and was immediately dubbed the news service’s space expert. “As sometimes happens in journalism, you write one story about something and all of a sudden you’re an expert,” Benedict recalled.

  But when the astronauts came to town, Benedict’s job—and the entire zeitgeist of Cocoa Beach—became less about rockets and more about the new celebrities of the space age. Reporters who were there in the early 1960s would later recall wistfully how there was no better place to be, no better story to cover. At times the boozy swirl of celebrity, technology, and sexuality seemed as surreal as a Technicolor Fellini flick.

  When NASA first crashed into town, there wasn’t even a church to counter all the debauchery, so a priest began holding makeshift Sunday morning services at a bowling alley. Patrons sat in folding chairs in lanes thirteen and fourteen and those looking toward heaven for inspiration saw instead a neon sign that suggested, DRINK SCHLITZ.

  Sand-covered streets turned carnival-like with a kaleidoscope of candy-colored sports cars and skimpy bikinis wrapped around young beauties drawn to the bacchanalia like moths to flame. At night you could stumble half-crocked from Wolfie’s and look north toward the reason for it all: the twinkly lights of the launch tower that would propel humans to the skies.

  “We knew we were doing the greatest story in history, no question,” Life photographer Ralph Morse said. Then again, access to the astronauts was a lot easier for Morse than the others. “We couldn’t get near them because of that damned Life contract,” Benedict recalled.

  Walter Cronkite, whom CBS sent to the Cape to capture a slice of the drama, recalled how the best place to cozy up to the astronauts was a bar. He ran into Shepard one night and they began talking about two of Shepard’s favorite subjects, cars and planes. Cronkite described how, as a cub reporter, he had flown on B-17 bombing runs during World War II and occasionally raced cars. Shepard grew immediately curious and talkative. “Maybe it gave me a little bit of an edge over the other reporters,” Cronkite said.

  One day Cronkite and Shepard and a few other reporters and astronauts learned about the sea turtles that returned to Cocoa Beach to lay eggs. The females wandered far and wide but always came back to the same exact nesting spot each year. State wildlife officials tried to protect those spots but agreed to take a small group of a dozen astronauts and press out to watch. It was apparently an impressive scene, Shepard had heard, with the females screaming in pain as they laid the eggs.

  The group arrived late one evening at a wooden ramp leading down to a secluded section of beach. Minutes after they arrived, they heard strange sounds coming from down the beach—moaning and muted screams that sounded almost human. Everyone wondered if it was an egg-laying turtle, but the wildlife official shook his head. He didn’t know what it was, so the group walked toward the sounds to investigate. Parked in the palmetto scrub they found a small convertible. In the backseat was Shorty Powers, tangled up with his secretary. The secretary ducked down behind the seats as Shorty jumped into the driver’s seat and began to pull away, hoping no one would see his face. Two photographers in the group began snapping pictures, and Shorty, assuming they were all there waiting for him, started screaming.

  “What kind of a trap is this? You people have entrapped me,” he yelled.

  Cronkite remembers it as “one of the grander evenings” of his time at Cocoa Beach. He and Shepard thought it was so hilarious, they headed straight for the nearest bar and never saw the turtles.

  Shepard might have taken Shorty’s embarrassing situation as a warning not to get caught with a woman when photographers were near. He did not get that message.

  Dee O’Hara, a labor and delivery nurse at the Patrick Air Force Base hospital south of Cape Canaveral in Florida, was called into her commanding officer’s office one day. Usually such a visit meant one of two things: promotion or punishment. But this day she faced neither. The colonel explained that he and his staff had been watching her for the past few weeks. They needed someone for a special assignment, a woman who was smart, savvy, and assertive, and they believed she had all those qualities. How would she like to be the astronauts’ nurse?

  O’Hara later learned that her boss, George Knauf, who was part of NASA’s vast medical team, had been criticized for suggesting a female nurse for the job. As O’Hara well knew, “It was really a male-dominated world.” But Knauf was able to argue that test pilots were trained to distrust doctors. They’d never admit to a doctor of having any ailment, which would put them at risk of being grounded. A female nurse, however—especially an attractive and perky redhead with a trim figure and a cute mole on her cheek—might be able to get closer to the astronauts than any male doctor could hope to get.

  “He wanted someone to get to know them so well that she’d know if they were sick or not,” O’Hara recalled. “That was the idea behind it. Someone they could trust and someone who’d know when they were ill.” But earning their trust was not an easy task— especially with Shepard. When O’Hara had her first meetings with the astronauts, “I was frightened of all of them . . . in awe of them . . . they were good and they knew it.”

  Her first few encounters with Shepard were especially unnerving. Just as he had always been with people he considered underlings, he was brusque, cocky, and rude to her. O’Hara noticed that, with his razor-sharp intellect, Shepard expected those around him to be razor-sharp as well. He liked to grill her with questions about her job, about the Air Force. She was shocked that he didn’t seem to realize how hurtful his scrutiny could be. She came to find that he introduced himself to most people by testing them. “It was a game with him. He enjoyed putting you on the spot—to see if you knew your stuff,” O’Hara recalled. “He got great pleasure from putting you through the hoops.”

  But after a few weeks of that, O’Hara got fed up. She stood up to him and they got into an argument over something. She’d soon forget what they argued about, but she’d never forget the change in their relationship after she raised her voice to Shepard. “I just sort of barked back at him,” she said. “And he smiled. And that was the end of it. We became friends right after that. From then on, we never had a problem.”

  Still, even with those who considered themselves his friends, he could be maddening. O’Hara had many conversations with Shepard that began warm and friendly but ended abruptly, as though a switch had been turned off. “You only got so close to Alan and then he shut you out,” O’Hara recalled.

  She assumed the technique was a source of power. But she also saw that it reflected a difficulty in making friends, something that didn’t come naturally for Shepard. In later years she’d learn he was actually kind, generous, emotional—a big-hearted softie beneath an abrasive exterior. But f
or some reason, he showed his softer side sparingly. Instead, he showed glowering blue eyes and a sneering flash of those big teeth.

  “Alan did not want you to know that he might like you,” O’Hara said. “He had a protective mechanism—protection from what, I don’t know.” O’Hara, like many of Shepard’s colleagues and friends, could never figure what lurked beneath his habit of keeping people off balance and at bay. Why didn’t he want people to know who he was? And, more to the point, who was he?

  “Why don’t you want people to like you?” O’Hara once asked him.

  “I do,” Shepard said. “I just don’t know how to do it.”

  For Shepard, it was all a matter of trust, or lack of it. There were aspects of his personality—secrets, really—that required his small coterie of true friends to practice discretion and restraint. For him to expose the deeper, sometimes darker sides of himself to others meant that they first had to prove they could be trusted. Trust had always been a given in the Navy, a fraternity built upon mutual protection. But NASA and Cocoa Beach and the national press . . . this was more like Hollywood than the Navy.

  Figuring out whom to like and whom to trust became a constant and frustrating fact of life at the Cape, where everyone wanted a piece of the astronauts. Shepard would struggle with that balancing act the rest of his life. And all who could call themselves his friend would recall having to first pass the kind of “test” O’Hara faced.

  One of the first at the Cape to pass muster with Shepard was Henri Landwirth.

  Landwirth was thirteen when he and many, many thousands of other Jews were taken from their homes in Poland and sent to Hitler’s labor and concentration camps. Landwirth was separated from his parents and later learned that his father, Max, had been shot and buried in a mass grave, while his mother, Fanny, just weeks from war’s end, was put to sea with a few hundred other women in an old ship rigged with explosives. After five years in the hellish death camps, Landwirth one day escaped into the woods and, traveling mostly at night, made a terrifying solo journey south to Czechoslovakia and then into Belgium, where he had been born and had spent the first few years of his life. He then said goodbye to his last few relatives—those who hadn’t been captured or killed—and fled. He emigrated to the United States in 1947.