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

by Neal Thompson

  Some of the newer astronauts would emerge drop-jawed from Shepard’s office, having just sat through a withering dressing-down. They’d be baffled that the guy who’d bought them a drink the previous night was now calling them a slacker. Shepard’s personal secretary, Gaye Alford, began trying to warn others of Shepard’s mood-of-the-day by hanging one of two pictures of her boss on the office door each morning. One picture was of a big-grinned Al Shepard, the other of a stern, scowling Commander Shepard. Some days—particularly after a Ménière’s episode, after which Louise would have to drive him to work—he’d walk into the office and slam his briefcase down on his desk. His secretary would know immediately which picture to choose.

  Astronauts would turn and walk the other way if they saw Shepard approaching down a hallway, and these were no milquetoasts. They were men who had been fighter pilots and test pilots, who lived to compete and confront. But Shepard wasn’t someone to be confronted. “Al could be friendly, outgoing, warm, a good leader and companion,” astronaut Mike Collins said. “But he could also be arrogant and put down friends or foe alike, with a searing stare and caustic comment.”

  When confronted—by Slayton or NASA’s brass—Shepard would explain that he was only trying to run a tight ship, treating the guys exactly how he’d expect to be treated. But in calmer moments he’d confess that he was “just mad at the world,” taking his frustrations out on those around him—especially those beneath him. He knew what was happening outside his door, that they called him the Icy Commander or worse. Mostly he didn’t care. He had little tolerance for “mistakes or frivolity or lack of performance among the astronauts.”

  One duty as head of the astronauts was hosting biweekly Monday morning pilot’s meetings, and if he was feeling good that day, the meeting might devolve into irreverence and jokes and arguments, like the ready room of an aircraft carrier, with pilots exchanging tales of some recent training mission or a jet flight in which they’d almost run out of gas. But if he was having an off day, or if he’d tossed his cookies on the bathroom tiles that morning, he might berate a pilot for the very same out-of-gas exploit.

  On such days he’d lecture the astronauts—just as John Glenn had a few years earlier—that they were part of a team, not a group of individuals. And he wanted the team to follow his rules and NASA’s. In an echo of his father, Shepard insisted on structure, order, compliance, and no surprises. There was a blatant irony to this, of course. Shepard had always been adept at detouring around the Navy’s rules and had become infamous for flouting NASA rules, too, and for playing as if he were a one-person team. Still, Slayton’s decision to put Shepard directly in charge of the astronauts—their travel plans, their training schedules, their public appearances—would ultimately pay off in huge benefits, for NASA and the astronauts.

  Fallaci, who had recently published a book about the historical role of women, called The Useless Sex, was fascinated by powerful, conflicted, iconic men. Toward the end of her interview with Shepard that afternoon, she bored in on the question that hovered around Shepard through much of the 1960s: Why was he even there? She knew Shepard was already a wealthy man, having quietly played off his astronaut celebrity status. She knew he owned a plush apartment at the downtown Mayfair building, full of wealthy retirees. She knew he had a beautiful wife there, and a bearded collie named Picasso. And she knew that he knew he’d already secured a place in the history books. So she asked him: “Don’t you think about life after space?”

  “Of course I think about it. I think about it a great deal, but I don’t make myself sick over it,” he said. “I’ll make a success of some other job. I’m a man of many interests.”

  Indeed, Shepard had become much more than a grounded astronaut/administrator. He even turned down an invitation from a New Hampshire political delegation to run for the U.S. Senate there so that he could devote energy to a new passion: making money.

  Since he was no longer throwing his energies into a demanding regimen of space training, Shepard found he could easily run the astronaut office with half his brain while juggling a bunch of moneymaking projects. In addition to continued income from Life magazine, he had pocketed a nice profit from his investment in the Cape Colony Inn a few years earlier. When a newspaper reporter had learned that the inn was partly owned by the Mercury Seven, he cried that it was a conflict of interest; Congress agreed, and NASA ordered the astronauts to divest themselves. For their $7,500 shares, each walked away with $49,000. Most of the seven immediately invested that money in some western Florida land with Henri Landwirth, which they later sold for $2 million.

  Shepard’s growing financial portfolio gave him the luxury of picking and choosing among the business proposals Houston’s captains of industry regularly laid at his feet. The first offer he decided to accept was part ownership and a vice president’s title at Baytown National Bank; Shepard and two partners bought the bank in 1963. In addition to twice-a-month board meetings, Shepard spent countless hours on the phone in his NASA office overseeing his profitable little bank. He seemed indifferent to, or maybe proud of, any questions about an astronaut who was also a banker—and an occasional oilman and rancher. In a note published in a Naval Academy alumni newsletter he told classmates: “Anticipating more spaceflights soon . . . Banking and wildcatting to a small degree.”

  Shepard regularly encouraged other astronauts to visit Baytown Bank for loans or to buy its stock shares. Behind his back they whispered yet another nickname, “the Loan Eagle.” Luring colleagues into business deals would turn sour one day, resulting in a nasty spat—and a never-made-public threat of a lawsuit— between Shepard and Scott Carpenter. Carpenter claimed that he lost money on devalued bank stocks because Shepard never told him the bank was about to be sold; Carpenter was then unable to repay a $25,000 loan and accused Shepard of “swindling” him.

  Often when one venture failed, another opportunity would present itself. Shepard invested in an oil-drilling venture with a Los Angeles–based petroleum company, but the company would later disappear and blow away, taking Shepard’s money with it. He partnered in a ranch in Weatherford, Texas, that raised cattle and race horses. Most were quarter horses, bred to race quarter-mile tracks, and one was worth more than $15,000. But Shepard was losing money on the horses, which might be why he tried to sell one to Oriana Fallaci. “Strong legs, iron fetlocks, excellent teeth,” he told her that afternoon in his office, offering a discounted price of $3,000. “Do you want to buy one?” Fallaci suspected he cared more for horses than the moon. She felt that if she didn’t leave his office soon, he’d sell her a horse, a cow, and shares in his bank. “He’d have cleaned me out,” she said.

  She found herself wondering what Shepard’s colleagues already wondered: How could he raise cattle, drill for oil, run a bank and be an astronaut? The other astronauts never confronted Shepard directly, but it bugged them like crazy that he’d preach to them about not taking gifts from fans, not accepting honorariums for lectures, not getting lured into risky business ventures. Meanwhile, they’d enter his office and hear him conducting bank business by phone. “It struck me as odd that our chief was a bank vice president,” wrote astronaut dropout Brian O’Leary in his controversial 1970 book, The Making of an Ex-Astronaut. O’Leary said he’d walk past Shepard’s office and see him “leaning back and philosophically gazing out the window.” There would be nothing on his desk, and O’Leary suspected Shepard’s mind was “on airplanes, sports cars, the bank, or the ranch.”

  Shepard once reprimanded O’Leary for accepting a faculty position at the University of Texas, telling O’Leary that he was an astronaut “24 hours a day . . . and I want to know about these things.” O’Leary felt burned by the “strange double standard.” He eventually quit the program, claiming that “flying just wasn’t my cup of tea.”

  “I didn’t deliberately try to intimidate him,” Shepard said later when asked about O’Leary’s gripes. “Perhaps I did because I could see that he really wasn’t going to work out,
he just wasn’t our breed of person. But there wasn’t any attempt to intimidate him—any more than I do anybody else.”

  Complaints and rumors eventually wafted toward the top levels of NASA, whose officials carefully questioned Shepard about running his small empire on government time. In a private letter in late 1963 NASA administrator James Webb said he’d been informed of Shepard’s growing role at Baytown National, and asked Shepard to “consider it with great care” before sinking deeper roots into the bank. Webb asked him to consider “the image that would be created in Houston” if astronauts began aligning with banks and financiers. Webb also requested that, in the future, Shepard submit an “official request for approval.” But it was hardly a letter of reprimand. In fact, Webb closed by offering to “stretch my discretion a long way to help you.”

  The letter had little effect on Shepard’s business activities. He went right on mixing astro-life, business life, and social life. Other astronauts tried to follow the example of the man astronaut Michael Collins called “the shrewdest of the bunch.” As astronaut Walt Cunningham learned from Shepard, “The astronaut hero image was directly convertible to dollars if handled right.” But none had the same success. Gus Grissom and Gordo Cooper partnered in a boat repair and retail business south of Houston but lost $16,000 each. Scott Carpenter made similarly bad business choices—a wasp-breeding venture among them. “There was Shepard, operating out there with the captains and kings of industry,” Cunningham once said. “And here were the rest of us, losing our lunch money.”

  Such failures eventually bred deep resentment of Shepard’s business successes, and the whispers again reached NASA’s ears. Two years after his first letter to Shepard in 1963, NASA administrator Webb wrote again after reading in the newspaper that Shepard had agreed to become president of Baytown Bank. Webb was furious that “a person who is doing a full-time job with the government, and particularly one who is in such a prominent position as you are,” would think it was acceptable to also be a bank president. Webb urged Shepard to “put the interest of NASA ahead of” his personal interests.

  Despite a tiny blurb in a Houston paper on Shepard’s promotion to bank president, few national reporters knew of Shepard’s business life. And those who did know a few details considered it none of their business and steered clear. But Oriana Fallaci dug in. How could he buy a bank on an astronaut’s salary? she asked. “All you need is to be ambitious,” he said, without explanation. Fallaci said she suspected he had a “very earthly hunger,” and Shepard concurred, locking his eyes on hers, a faint grin on his big lips. “One day I’ll be very rich,” he told her. And what about the stars? she asked. Didn’t he want to reach the stars like the others do? Or was he more interested in banks and cows and horses? “All of it,” he said. But shouldn’t the stars come first? “You’re a very romantic woman—too much so,” Shepard said, signaling the end of the interview. “There’s nothing romantic about going to the stars, believe me.”

  Fallaci left Shepard’s office feeling a little sorry for him. She had heard he sought out women, money, cars, and “applause.” But she liked him anyway. She was confused as she continued researching her book in future months, when she’d meet different versions of Shepard. She’d see him in a bar, at a missile launch, or lying beside a hotel pool at the Cape, sometimes “friendly,” other times “standoffish,” sometimes “confident,” sometimes “shy.” She wondered if he’d been burned by the “sickness of celebrity.” Burned out, maybe. How else to explain a man who found no romance in the pursuit of the heavens? The truth, however, was not burnout. Not even close.

  Shepard knew he had an incurable disease and was often disgusted and demoralized by it. But he was also disciplined and self-confident enough to lie in wait, stalking tigerlike for a chance to cure himself. He may not have considered space exploration a romantic pursuit, but it was an important one and he wouldn’t give up. So the real answer to the question “Why are you here?” was that Shepard was absolutely, intractably determined to reach the stars once more.

  When Shepard’s illness sidelined him, NASA gave his Gemini flight to Gus Grissom who, along with John Young, one of the Next Nine, took off in late March of 1965 aboard Gemini 3, ending a two-year hiatus since the final Project Mercury flight. That inaugural Gemini flight was overshadowed, however—as many U.S. flights had been in the early years of the space race—by another Soviet first. Just five days before Grissom’s flight, a Soviet cosmonaut crawled through a hatch in his capsule and floated freely in the empty blackness of space, connected to his spaceship by a tether. The first space walk came five months after the Soviets’ first three-person space mission, which made Grissom’s two-man Gemini flight seem archaic. But the days of Russian dominance in space were about to end. The space walk flight would be the last Soviet space launch for two years. During that lull the United States would send sixteen men into space—four of them twice—and begin racking up many firsts of its own.

  Grissom’s flight would be quickly followed by another Gemini flight, and then another, turning 1965 into NASA’s most productive year. Thirty astronauts were now training for upcoming Gemini and Apollo flights; the number would grow to thirty-five in mid-1965 when NASA selected five more astronauts to join its growing ranks. Shepard’s role was helping his astronauts get to training facilities and stick to a tight schedule. To help the men zip back and forth across the land, Shepard and Slayton convinced NASA to replace its older jets with a new fleet that the astronauts could borrow for their many travels. The sleek, two-seater supersonic T-38s could soar to forty thousand feet in ninety seconds.

  Flying the T-38 was one of the better perks of astronaut life. The astronauts’ training schedule resembled the one Shepard had experienced during Project Mercury: long, dizzy sessions in the MASTIF, body-slamming spins in the centrifuge, many hours of simulated practice sessions, visits to aerospace factories. The jets became trusted companions during the many rootless, grueling days of crisscrossing the nation.

  The cockpit of a T-38 offered respite from the public’s unrelenting love affair with the astronauts (which was emboldened, in no small part, by the surprising success of a new TV show in which Captain Kirk and the crew of the USS Enterprise explored strange new worlds in outer space). Shepard, as their keeper, tried to protect the astronauts from the demands of NASA’s public affairs office, which was swamped with fan mail and requests for astronaut appearances. Reaching the moon was still a magical, powerful national goal, and the public wanted access to the men who were right on schedule to achieve Kennedy’s commitment to putting men on the moon before 1970.

  Shepard had the distasteful task of assigning his underlings to the dreaded “week in the barrel,” as he had dubbed the dog-and-pony gigs astronauts served visiting schools and congressmen. The “barrel” referred to one of Shepard’s favorite obscene jokes, a story about a weary traveler who staggers into an Alaskan mining camp looking for love and is directed to a back room where there’s a large barrel with a hole in the side.

  During such weeks, an astronaut might make thirty appearances, giving the same speech to thirty different audiences, in five days. With so much flying, a law of astronaut life evolved: When two or more astronauts are involved in the same activity, it becomes a contest. A race.

  Gus Grissom earned notoriety for his “hot refuelings.” In an effort to gain a few minutes on the other guy, he’d leave his engine running during a refueling stop and cut the record refueling time of ten minutes in half. That prompted some to try nonstop flights from, say, Los Angeles to Houston. The trick was to reach a safe altitude, catch a tailwind, and fly on just one of the two engines. Wally Schirra once landed in Houston with less than five minutes of fuel left and with his partner, Walt Cunningham, sitting nervously in the back, ready to punch the eject button. Shepard often joined the others on such flights, but some of his colleagues found it painful to watch the former crack test pilot climb into the rear seat as a passenger.

  “He never tal
ked about it, he never showed it. But you could just tell at times it bothered him,” said Chuck Friedlander, who worked as Shepard’s assistant at the Cape. “When Al climbed into the back seat of a T-38 and some young guy was flying it, nothing was said, but you could just tell by his face he was feeling the inability to fly.” At such times, they all felt his frustration, and that empathy sometimes tempered their reaction to his Icy Commander days.

  Jim Lovell flew with Shepard many times through the 1960s, sometimes straight across the country, from the Cape to California. Shepard loved stopping to refuel in El Paso, crossing the border into Mexico to get cut-rate bottles of tequila. In the rear seat, Shepard would often insist on taking the controls and flying the lion’s share of each flight.

  Still, Shepard operated on the fringes of the astronaut lifestyle he had so recently defined. As the boss of all astronauts, he was their teacher, not their classmate. His job was to corral them, get them places, make sure they didn’t take advantage of their easy-access, government-funded jets. Like a camp counselor, he had to make sure no one wandered off into the woods. He was the taskmaster. And he was good at it.

  Among Shepard’s unique management techniques was the silent treatment. He’d call an astronaut into his office, and the other man would stand in front of his desk while he looked up at them “with those bulging eyes” and “stare right through you,” recalled Lovell. “A very cold person,” remembered astronaut secretary Lola Morrow. “He knew he could use his eyes as a weapon.”

  Shepard would then sit there, feet on the desk, and wait for the astronaut to speak first. The new guy would get scared, turn red, look down, look away, speak in mumbles. Finally, after letting him twist, Shepard would get to the point and ream him out. He was especially hard on the younger guys and on the scientists NASA had begun selecting to become astronauts. He was somewhat less harsh with his fellow Navy men. Slayton sometimes intervened as the good cop, but mostly he let Shepard handle things his way. He knew Shepard’s intentions were to hone his men into perfect astronauts.