Louise knew all this, too. Though she threw up again and again during the long night before her husband’s splashdown, she was elated after watching on TV as Shepard boarded a Navy ship bound for Houston, where he would be safe behind the glass windows of the postflight quarantine room. She was relieved, exhausted, and proud—proud of her “old man Moses . . . because he made his promised land.”
Back at Houston they brought overflowing breakfast trays into the quarantine room, where Shepard and his two crewmates sat reading the newspapers and drinking coffee, still isolated from the rest of the world, still in a world of their own. Shepard had always been a good eater. During his nine days in space he “ate just about everything there was to eat.” He popped open cans of beans, squirted water into bowls of dehydrated soup, peeled the wrappers off granola bars.
In fact, after nine days in space, despite the strenuous and sweaty two-mile round-trip hike to Cone Crater, Shepard returned to earth one pound heavier than when he’d left. Every other astronaut before him had lost weight—sometimes a lot. Jim Lovell, during his terrifying Apollo 13 mission, had lost an amazing fourteen pounds. John Glenn had lost four pounds during his tension-filled, four-hour flight back in 1962—a pound an hour. Even Shepard’s crewmate Stu Roosa lost ten pounds over the course of Apollo 14.
The fact that Shepard was, as the New York Times put it, “the first man to gain weight while in space” fascinated NASA scientists and made for a curious story in that day’s Times. Another headline caught Shepard’s eye that morning, too: “Astronaut Conducts ESP Experiment on Moon Flight.” Shepard had read enough inaccuracies in the press to immediately distrust the story. He shook his head, then looked up from his breakfast. “Hey, Ed. Did you see this? Isn’t it amazing the things that people make up?”
Mitchell had always kept his deeper feelings about space flight to himself. He regarded outer space more philosophically than most of the other astronauts, who were strongly tech-minded. Though he had enviable scientific credentials, Mitchell had always considered the cosmos “something larger than myself . . . something incomprehensibly big.” And in traveling to the moon, he intended not only to collect rocks but also to conduct his own personal experiment that might lend a clue to “the origins of our existence.” Years later, he’d admit that a trip to the moon was more than a science experiment for him, more than an aeronautic adventure; it was “a mystical experience.” He had no choice but to tell Shepard the truth. “I did it, boss.”
En route to the moon, that night Roosa had seen him with his flashlight, Mitchell had pulled a small pad from his pocket. On the pad were symbols—circles, squares, wavy lines, stars— with a number assigned to each symbol. He concentrated for fifteen seconds on each symbol. Back on earth, at the prescribed time, friends of Mitchell’s tried to telepathically pick up his thoughts and to write down the numbers they “heard.” He did this twice on the way to the moon and twice on the way home, with the earth sliding in and out of his window as the capsule slowly spun like a pig on a spit to disperse the sun’s rays.
During those quiet moments, while his two crewmates slept, Mitchell had experienced a feeling of “being swaddled by the cosmos.” Much later he’d elaborate about his feelings of “joy,” energized by the “divine presence” he felt electrifying the universe around him. But at breakfast back on earth that day, Mitchell made no apologies or explanations, and Shepard just stared at him a few moments; he said later that he had had no idea about Mitchell’s experiments, that he was “surprised” and might have even nixed the plan if he’d learned about it in advance. But that morning, still buzzing from a successful mission, Shepard just nodded and smiled a bit, then returned to his newspaper, eggs, and bacon. Mitchell later compared his ESP tests to Shepard’s golf shot: “He did his thing, I did my thing.”
Once freed from their quarantine, the three astronauts surfed a tidal wave of parades, galas, ceremonies, and television appearances, capped off by the invitation to Nixon’s White House for dinner. Although Shepard was a fairly consistent Republican, he was not a big fan of Nixon, who he felt “didn’t know anything about space,” was far less interested in NASA than his Democratic predecessors, and was guilty of letting Washington’s support for the space program lag.
That night at the White House Nixon kept up the tradition of promoting astronauts. Mitchell became a Navy captain, and Roosa became an Air Force lieutenant colonel. But Navy rules prevented him from promoting Shepard from captain to admiral. In place of a promotion, Nixon commended Shepard—and the “first celestial hole-in-one”—by inducting him into the “distinguished order of lunar duffers,” despite the fact that “Shepard’s first two swings were embarrassing failures.” But Nixon promised to “find a way to make you an admiral eventually.”
A month later he made good on his promise. In late April 1971, from a list of two thousand Navy captains, Nixon approved the promotion of forty-nine of those captains to the exalted rank of rear admiral. Among the names was Shepard’s, the only astronaut to make admiral and among the few Navy admirals who had never commanded a ship.
Shepard’s father, Bart, was thrilled to learn that his son had reached the pinnacle of the Navy’s hierarchy. From then on, just as his father had insisted on being addressed as “Colonel,” Shepard asked to be called “Admiral,” even by his children.
Shepard’s celebrity also led to an invitation from George H. W. Bush, then the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, to serve as a delegate. The friendship between Shepard and Bush dated back to when they had been neighbors in Houston’s wealthiest suburb. They’d recently met again at a UN meeting in San Francisco, where they talked about how great it would be to take the UN’s Security Council into space and ask each member to point to his country. “He wouldn’t be able to find it because there are no political boundaries,” Shepard told Bush. “As a planet, we are so small and unified.”
Across two months with the UN delegation in New York, Shepard took part in an eight-hour session that led to mainland China being voted into the UN. In the halls and at cocktail parties, he signed autographs and tried to tell UN members “what a fragile, beautiful place” the earth was when viewed from space. “It’s too bad there are so many people on earth who can’t get along,” he said.
When all the accolades and public appearances had settled down—the appearance with Bob Hope before troops in Vietnam, the invitations to prizefights, the Broadway plays, the drunken night in New York with Lauren Bacall, and the overtures from politicians trying to lure him into politics—Alan, Louise, and their daughters traveled to New Hampshire for a much-needed respite. There Alan attended a retirement ceremony for his favorite high school teacher and hosted a fiftieth wedding anniversary for his parents at a nearby country club.
One night during their stay in New Hampshire Louise, Renza, and the girls worked in the kitchen, cleaning up after dinner, while Alan and his father—the admiral and the colonel—sat in the living room sipping snifters of brandy. In the corner stood the pipe organ that Bart still played each day, a reminder of the Saturday afternoons so long ago when Alan trundled along with his father to the church and helped him tune the six hundred pipes of the huge church organ. Over the years Bart had continued running his small-town insurance agency, driving a half mile to work in the same office, lunching at the same restaurant, day after day, year after year.
His son, meanwhile, sailed aboard Navy ships to all corners of the globe, flew jets at supersonic speeds and superhuman heights, drove Corvettes, rocketed to space, and golfed on the moon—arguably one of the most eloquently traveled men alive.
And yet Alan had developed an admiring respect for his father’s consistently homespun and simplified lifestyle. “My father’s example was he led a good life,” Shepard would one day admit.
That evening after dinner, father and son talked about Shepard’s promotion to admiral, about his plans for the future, and about the moon. At one point Bart turned to his son and said, “Do you remember when
you first told us back in 1959 that you were going to become an astronaut?”
“Yes, sir,” Alan said.
“Do you remember what I said?”
“Yes, sir, I certainly do,” Alan said. In fact, Alan would never be able to forget Bart’s admonitions against veering off his Navy career path, and how he’d felt as though he was tearing the family apart with his risky enrollment in NASA. “You were not in favor of it.”
“Well,” Bart said, his voice a little shaky as he raised his glass of brandy in a toast, “I was wrong.”
Fifteen months later, the colonel died at the age of eighty-two.
Part III
AFTER SPACE
20
“When you’ve been to the moon, where else are you going to go?”
Some astronauts, upon retiring from NASA, had no clue where to go next. They’d seen things, experienced things, and visited places that set them apart. NASA employees said they could often tell which astronauts had been to space and which hadn’t—a legit spaceman’s face carried a look of contentment, his gait had bounce, he was patient and dreamy and mysterious. Such men were special, different, and they knew it. But how to transfer the gift of space into a fulfilling life on earth? Some astronauts, unable to answer that question, dove into misery.
Shepard’s moonwalking partner, Ed Mitchell, returned to earth convinced that his ESP experiments had been a success. In his ongoing search for deeper meaning after the “epiphany” of Apollo 14, he became obsessed with parapsychology and founded an institute for aspiring psychics. Meanwhile, his marriage collapsed and he was named in a paternity suit by a Playboy bunny who later became his third wife. “My personal life has been somewhat in turbulence ever since,” he said thirty years later.
On the moon, Apollo 15’s LM pilot Jim Irwin had “felt the power of God as I’d never felt it before” and subsequently dedicated years of his life to finding Noah’s ark in the rugged mountains of Turkey. Buzz Aldrin often bristled at his second billing behind Neil Armstrong, arguing that they were both the first men on the moon (“we landed at the same time,” he’d say); he later fell apart, weeping and drinking on his way to a nervous breakdown from which he later recovered. Gene Cernan, who as commander of Apollo 17 became the last man to walk on the moon in 1972—a moment he called “the climax of my life”— spent many years afterward trying to top his lunar experience. “The search goes on, and sooner or later you come to grips with the fact that you’re going to have to live within the confines of what’s left,” Cernan said.
Cernan and other lunar explorers found they had neglected everything else in their life—wife, kids, friends, finances. Some astronauts retired from NASA and discovered they had become complete strangers to their children—after Aldrin returned from the moon and reunited with his family, he asked his son how school was going, only to be told that it was summer vacation and school was out. Aldrin wasn’t alone in feeling that life had progressed in his absence. Astronauts found that their wives had created their own lives—their husbands were now expendable. An epidemic of divorces swept through NASA in the early 1970s as the astronaut wives’ club begat an offspring, the exwives’ club.
Many astronauts—especially the twelve who walked on the moon—also suffered from severe shock upon learning that, despite their wild expeditions, they were regular, flawed humans. A common conceit was If I can go to the moon, I can do anything. But many returned to their regular lives to find they could not do everything—they failed at business, parenthood, love, and life. The reality of life after NASA was also devoid of the astro-perks many were accustomed to: mingling with world leaders and celebrities, dining at the White House, sleeping with groupies, and having NASA jets at their disposal.
Years after bouncing across the lunar surface on his Apollo 12 mission, Alan Bean said that, having achieved his life’s goal of reaching the moon, he felt fortunate to have found another mission to sustain his life: painting gray-toned lunar landscapes and portraits of space-suited astronauts. “Some unfortunate ones didn’t have a dream to replace the dream of going to the moon,” Bean said years later.
For Shepard, returning to real life was neither a shock nor a disappointment. He did not return from the moon to find his earthly life in a shambles. In his hyperkinetic way, he had never allowed himself to slow down, even during his lengthy battle with Ménière’s disease, and had therefore paid careful attention to all matters of his life, big and small.
He had always tried to carve out father-daughter moments. Julie, Laura, and Alice were often among the only astronauts’ children at NASA events. He took them skiing in Colorado and taught them and their friends to water-ski at the lake house he and Louise had purchased near Austin, Texas. He once rented a small plane to fly his daughters and their girlfriends from Texas to Maine for summer camp—although the friends later complained that they would have preferred a more comfortable commercial flight. When Laura, Julie, and Alice began having children of their own, he doted on his six grandchildren, too. He’d visit their classrooms and teach them to ski. He once told a friend he didn’t realize how much fun kids were until he became a grandfather. After leaving NASA, he tried to incorporate the girls—and their kids—even more into his life.
In the years after Apollo 14, Shepard began spending more time with Louise, too. As he watched colleagues’ lives fall apart, he realized how valuable she had been to him. “He knew he had a good one,” recalled NASA secretary Lola Morrow. Alan and Louise began to travel together: biennial trips to the Paris Air Show and a long tour of the Orient, ski trips to Colorado and golf trips to Pebble Beach, where they were thinking of retiring. “Louise never thought of leaving him, never,” said Louise’s friend Dorel. “And I don’t think he ever thought of leaving her. It was a strong marriage that grew stronger.”
For Shepard, an Apollo 14 medallion hanging around his neck was the only outward sign of the moon’s effect on his life. He considered his moonwalks something to cherish but chose not to dwell on the experience; rather, he decided “to put it in a box, and on a shelf, look at it once in a while, put it back on the shelf, and try something totally different.”
Unlike some peers, the question of what to do next was full of possibility and promise, not dread. As he’d told Oriana Fallaci years earlier when she’d asked about life after space: “I’ll make a success of some other job—I’m a man of many interests.”
He could have been anything he wanted to be—a celebrity, a politician, a TV announcer. But he turned all of it down, preferring not to remain in the public eye. “I’ve gone to great lengths to maintain my privacy,” he once said after turning down a request to appear in an American Express television ad. “I don’t want to give it up for the lure of commercial endorsements.”
Not that he didn’t wrestle some with the issue of how to spend the rest of his days. He once acknowledged the significant weight of the question: “I’ve been the world’s greatest test pilot. I’ve been to the moon. I mean, what else is there? When you’ve been to the moon, where else are you going to go?”
One thing Shepard knew for sure was that after announcing his decision to retire from NASA in 1974, he did not want to return to the Navy. He loved his admiral’s rank, but he had little interest in actually being an admiral—which infuriated the U.S. Navy. When Nixon had promoted Shepard to rear admiral, the expectation was that he’d stay with the Navy and serve in some high-profile position. Instead he took his rank and retired. Some called him a “tombstone admiral”—someone who sticks it out just long enough to earn a rank to have etched into their tombstone. “The Navy was really pissed off,” said astronaut Jim Lovell. “He knew he wasn’t going to go back to the Navy.”
What Shepard chose instead was the world of business. By the time he’d left NASA, at age fifty-one, Shepard had already sold his shares in Baytown Bank and Fidelity Bank and Trust Co., earning $581,000 and $50,000, respectively. He’d sold his rural Texas oil wells—“about broke even on that,” he once sa
id—and conceded defeat and sold his money-losing quarter horse business. “So,” he once said, “I’ve made some good business deals and I’ve made some bad ones.”
In the early days of post-NASA life he sifted through many offers from private contractors doing business with NASA who would have loved to employ a high-profile ex-astronaut. But Shepard claimed to feel strongly that he shouldn’t use “the visibility” of his ex-astronaut status “for my own personal gain.” The truth was, he wanted some distance from the astronaut world, and turned down lucrative offers to lecture and requests to seek public office for the same reason: He didn’t want to be in any spotlight.
But sorting through all the offers could be a full-time, complicated job in itself. Gordo Cooper sometimes saw Shepard at NASA functions, and they’d talk about how businessmen flocked to them “like ducks to water.” Once they stood in a parking lot outside a conference swapping business cards and stories about this one and that one.
“Did you meet this guy?” Shepard would ask, then slap a business card down on his car hood. “How about this one? Is this guy for real?”
Wally Schirra and Scott Carpenter suffered through their share of business deals gone bad, too, but Gordo Cooper slogged through some of the worst investments among the astronauts. He lost his shirt on his boat dealer business south of Houston and had to testify in court a few times against accused swindlers, including some guys who tried to drag him into a helicopter manufacturing scam in South America. The FBI once stepped in to warn him about a certain bad apple he was considering as a partner.
Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman Page 45
