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

by Neal Thompson

  Wolfe’s unique voice brought to life an era that no previous writer had managed to capture so fully. Maybe it required distance and perspective, and maybe that’s why previous attempts to scratch deeper than the sanitized Life magazine version of the space race—by such notable writers as Norman Mailer, no less— had failed. But The Right Stuff’s huge success was due in part to its telling of the dark and sexy side of the astronaut story—the less-than-heroic stuff that all other journalists and authors of the 1960s obediently stayed away from, or never got near.

  Freed from the limits of being an obligatory hagiographer, Wolfe let loose with sensual references to “young juicy girls with stand-up jugs and full-sprung thighs” lurking around the astronauts. Astronauts probably wondered what the hell Wolfe was talking about when he wrote of astro-groupies with “conformations so taut and silky that the very sight of them practically pulled a man into the delta of priapic delirium.” Astronaut wives didn’t exactly appreciate the exposition.

  Louise’s friend Dorel Abbot had just finished reading the book and, shocked at the portrayal of Shepard and the others— but especially Shepard—immediately phoned Louise. “Did you read it?” Dorel asked.

  “Nope,” Louise said.

  Dorel asked again six months later. “Did you read it?”

  “Nope,” Louise said.

  Finally, a year later, she asked once more, and Louise said, “Yup.”

  “Well, are you going to do anything?” Dorel asked. “Say anything?”

  “Nope.”

  Louise said she had decided not to confront Alan. It wasn’t worth rocking the boat. Not this late in their marriage, which in nearly every other way was an ideal union. Besides, even if she did confront him, she felt he’d probably not admit it anyway. “I have nothing to gain and everything to lose,” Louise said.

  The surviving Mercury Seven reacted with varying degrees of distaste to The Right Stuff, although they uniformly resented its portrayal of their dead friend Gus as a bumbling goat who panicked, blew the hatch off his Mercury capsule, and let it sink. Slayton said “none of it was all that accurate, but it was well done” and “captured the spirit of the times.” Schirra said Wolfe took a lot of “poetic license”; Cooper called it “literary license.” When the film was later released, Carpenter called it “a great movie.”

  Glenn, whom Wolfe portrayed as the “prig” of the group, came across as a moralizing prude, but admirably so. And while it’s impossible to prove a connection, when Glenn ran for his second Senate term in 1980, a year after the book came out, he won by a landslide. Emboldened by that victory, he soon launched his presidential campaign. Glenn liked the book but said it was “not exactly our favorite movie.”

  Shepard, on the other hand, more than any of the others, hated the book, calling it “just fiction.” He never hid his distaste for the movie, either. “What movie?” he’d say. In lighter moments he’d joke that the actor who portrayed him—Scott Glenn— “was nowhere near as tough as I was, and nowhere near as good-looking.” It infuriated Shepard that Wolfe re-created the lives of the Mercury Seven without interviewing any of “the original guys,” he once said. Also, without coming out and specifically saying it, Wolfe insinuates that Shepard was the king of the Mercury Seven womanizers. At one point Wolfe describes how Shepard acted when he was away from home: “A great goomba-goomba grin would take over his face. You halfway expected to see him start snapping his fingers, because everything about him seemed to be asking the question: ‘Where’s the action?’ ” It’s no wonder Shepard detested The Right Stuff.

  And yet no one had ever pulled the curtain back so far on the astronauts’ lives as did Tom Wolfe. The public’s reaction was one of awed rediscovery. Those who had lived through it were reminded of the heady days of Sputnik, Kennedy, Armstrong. Those who hadn’t lived through it got a history lesson on the thrills and spills of the space race. Suddenly astronauts were heroes again. People wanted autographs again. Organizations wanted the Mercury Seven to attend their fund-raisers and their banquets.

  Shepard and the others were celebrities once more.

  Through the 1970s and early ’80s, Shepard and the other five surviving space pioneers had quietly drifted apart, each pursuing his own postspace life. Carpenter, Cooper, Schirra, and Glenn hadn’t been astronauts since the 1960s. Shepard had left NASA in 1974. Slayton stuck around longer than any of them and, after conquering the heart murmur that had gotten him grounded back in 1962, finally reached space aboard the final Apollo mission, a joint 1975 U.S.-Soviet mission called the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project.

  But in the aftermath of The Right Stuff fever, the Mercury Seven began appearing together at regular events. “Thanks to the book and the later movie,” Slayton said, “we were all lumped back together in people’s minds again, whether we wanted it or not.” After years of nursing old grudges over business deals, astro-politics, and hurt feelings, the original astronauts became friends again. They began calling each other on the phone, swapping dirty jokes. As Slayton put it, “old disagreements didn’t seem so important anymore.”

  Shepard and Glenn still sometimes bristled against each other, however, and their strained and rusty friendship took a while to loosen up. At one commemorative banquet in Houston Shepard spoke to the crowd about the glow of fame that had shone on him after Freedom 7, how people called him a hero and stoked his admittedly large ego, which at the time made him wonder how many living Americans were truly great. “One less than you think,” Glenn interjected.

  Prompted by The Right Stuff hype, the astronauts’ old inn-keeper friend from the Cape, Henri Landwirth—who had maintained his delicately balanced friendship with both Shepard and Glenn—began floating an idea for the astronauts to use their newfound exposure to raise money for charity, which could also serve to keep the Mercury Seven team together. After successfully managing the Cocoa Beach Holiday Inn in the early 1960s, Landwirth had gone on to greater successes with the Holiday Inn corporation, and even partnered in a few hotels with Glenn. Landwirth the Holocaust survivor had become a rich man and was now dedicating his life to charitable ventures. His idea was for the six surviving Mercury Seven astronauts—along with Gus Grissom’s widow, Betty—to create a scholarship program for needy students interested in science and engineering.

  Shepard liked the idea from the start and agreed to serve as the foundation’s chair and president. But he was still running his Texas business enterprises and didn’t have time to spare. “We like the idea; there’s only one catch. You’ll have to make it happen,” he told Landwirth. “Your idea, you do it.” Landwirth, who was living in Orlando, agreed to handle all the paperwork, found an office, and hired a part-time director.

  But the Mercury Seven Foundation got off to a very slow start, raising less than $100,000 in its first two years, and often teetered on the brink of collapse. Neither Shepard nor the other astronauts at first served as anything more than halfhearted philanthropists. Then an unexpected source of inspiration occurred in 1986, two years after the foundation began, and coinciding with the twenty-fifth anniversary of Shepard’s Freedom 7 mission.

  On January 28 Shepard joined other celebrities, such as Clint Eastwood and George C. Scott, and golf pros like Jack Nicklaus and Tom Watson at the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am golf tournament (formerly the Crosby Pro-Am, the celebrity-filled tournament started by Bing Crosby in the 1950s). While playing a practice round on the spectacular beachfront Pebble Beach course, Shepard learned that the space shuttle Challenger had just exploded. Clutching a drink in the clubhouse after his round, Shepard watched televised accounts of the tragedy, and those around him winced as they watched Shepard’s face contort with each replay of the shuttle’s destruction. Killed in the disaster were six astronauts and Christa McAuliffe, a schoolteacher from Shepard’s home state of New Hampshire, who just prior to her flight had told reporters how “thrilled” and “envious” she’d been watching Shepard’s flight twenty-five years earlier. Shepard was disgusted
by the Challenger tragedy, which was caused by a faulty “O”-ring seal and which he blamed on the same “insidious” factors that had caused the Apollo 1 fire—“a sense of overconfidence, a sense of complacency.”

  Three months later, on May 5, the Mercury Seven Foundation held a black-tie, $150-a-plate banquet in Los Angeles to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Freedom 7. Shepard had asked his friend Bob Hope to serve as the foundation’s honorary chairman—a first step toward rejuvenating the foundering scholarship program. “We thought, as a group, we’d collectively have a lot of credibility still, and maybe we should use that to help inspire young people to become involved in space,” Shepard told a newspaper reporter in a rare interview.

  After two years during which the foundation had struggled to survive, Shepard decided to step in and help revive it. More financial support for science and engineering, he reasoned, might contribute to the prevention of deadly explosions such as happened to the Challenger, and might prevent the demise of the Gus Grissoms of the future.

  Somewhere around this same time Shepard began to explore what he now considered an even greater challenge than making money: giving money away. In addition to rededicating himself to the Mercury Seven Foundation, he began working with friends in Houston to raise money for a school for deaf children. He helped raise money for the Houston-based Charles A. Lindbergh Fund and secretly gave money to help a child in Seabrook, Texas, suffering from leukemia. He also agreed to chair a golf tournament sponsored by the Loctite Corp. in Detroit (on whose board of directors he sat), which raised money for scholarships to send underprivileged kids to a weeklong space camp at Kennedy Space Center.

  On top of that, he regularly gave money to friends—including a few astronauts—to help them out of a bind or help them get started in business. He helped his Apollo 14 colleague Stu Roosa establish his own Coors distributorship and gave one of his secondhand cars to a former NASA colleague. When his parents’ longtime housekeeper’s well water dried up, he called and arranged for a new well to be drilled, on his tab; later, when the housekeeper’s husband died, he sent her $5,000.

  Shepard was especially dogged in his efforts to collect donations for the Mercury Seven Foundation. He gave a few thousand of his own money here and there. Anything he earned from one of his golf tournaments or the rare speaking engagement, he donated to the foundation. “He didn’t take one penny for himself,” Landwirth recalled.

  At first the foundation had been run by a part-time, $18,000-a-year employee. But Shepard decided it needed a full-time manager and cajoled his friend, the AP reporter Howard Benedict, who was about to retire, into taking over as the foundation’s manager. Benedict found he couldn’t turn Shepard down and agreed to work twenty-five hours a week for the foundation. But as Shepard began touring the country, hosting fund-raisers and asking friends and corporations for money, Benedict’s part-time job became a seriously full-time commitment. After giving just seven $1,000 scholarships in 1986, the foundation was handing out ten $7,500 scholarships annually by 1990, and across its first fifteen years would dole out more than $1 million. “He became passionate about it,” Benedict recalled. “I think it was a legacy he wanted to leave. It was his baby.”

  The foundation was renamed the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation and in 1990 moved to Titusville, a small town beside Kennedy Space Center on Florida’s coast. The foundation inspired the creation of another charitable group, the Space Camp Foundation, and an increasing flow of donations helped fund the construction of an Astronaut Hall of Fame and gift shop, whose profits would go back into the scholarship foundation. The other surviving Mercury Seven were amazed that Shepard, a man known for occasional self-indulgence and conceit, was now throwing himself at philanthropy. “He was very generous,” Schirra said. “But he kept it to himself.” Said Glenn: “Al was the one who really persisted and got that thing going.”

  Glenn and others noticed that something had considerably mellowed in the formerly hyper and combative Icy Commander. The raw whiskey of Shepard’s younger self had aged and matured into a smooth and smoky bourbon. And yet, like a teenager with a new car, he became famous among his circle of friends for popping up in their cities—Dallas, Denver, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Cocoa Beach—and calling unannounced in search of some fun, a few drinks, dinner, or a round of golf. “Hey, what’re you doing?” he’d say, without ever identifying himself on the phone. “Let’s do something.”

  One of the other twelve moonwalkers once said: “I think almost everyone who went to the moon became more like they really were down deep inside.” Said another: “You really end up caring for this planet.” Shepard never opened up publicly about such things, but those close to him felt that being among a handful of humans to have seen the delicate blue marble of the earth floating 250,000 miles off in the black sea of the universe did something to him.

  Henri Landwirth certainly felt that Shepard had become a better man. In 1986, after helping create the Mercury Seven Foundation, Landwirth had started his own charitable organization, Give Kids the World. On a fifty-one acre plot of central Florida on the outskirts of Disney World, Landwirth created a wonderland where terminally ill children and their families could have ice cream sundaes for breakfast, play all day on carousels, and watch movies every night. A place of joy, but also sorrow. Landwirth’s dream was to give dying children a last chance at giddy, all-expenses-paid happiness—a fairy tale come true. Money raised for Give Kids the World offered children and their families a week in Landwirth’s fantasy village, a break from the hospitals and doctors, a last chance to be a family before the blackness of death. Shepard began raising money for Landwirth’s project as well as his own foundation.

  He would wrestle a $100,000 donation from Coca-Cola for the astronaut foundation one week. The next week he’d pressure his friends at Kmart (whose stores he had helped develop) to donate to Landwirth’s Give Kids the World. In future years, at Shepard’s encouraging, Kmart would become one of Give Kids the World’s biggest supporters, donating millions of dollars year after year. “I saw a different Alan Shepard,” Landwirth said, “completely different from the man I’d known in the old days.”

  Shepard’s friend Allen H. Neuharth, the founder of USA Today, also saw a “gradual softening” in Shepard’s once-icy demeanor, and invited Shepard to sit on the boards of two Washington-based foundations endowed by the Gannett newspaper chain, the Freedom Forum and the First Amendment Center. Freedom Forum board members were each given an allotment of up to $100,000 a year to donate to the charity of their choosing. Shepard chose the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation and Give Kids the World. “He had money and time, and he did what his instincts told him: to spend his time spending his money on others,” Neuharth recalled.

  Another sign of the kinder, gentler Alan Shepard was his commitment to a book project with Slayton. In 1992 Slayton began working on a book with Neil Armstrong, Howard Benedict, and NBC reporter Jay Barbree. When Armstrong backed out, Benedict asked Shepard to help out. Until then Shepard had never considered writing a book. Other astronauts had published their autobiographies or had books written about them. But whenever the idea was broached with Shepard, he shooed prospective biographers away. There was nothing he needed to share with the public that hadn’t been shared already. But when he learned that Slayton had been diagnosed with a brain tumor and that his prospects did not look good, Shepard agreed: “If this will help Deke, I’ll do it.”

  In 1993 Slayton died at the age of sixty-nine, and Shepard immediately flew to Houston to help Deke’s wife, Bobbie, make funeral arrangements. Moonshot came out a year later—the New York Times called it a “swashbuckling” version of the space race— and Shepard vigorously promoted the book, with appearances at bookstores across the country. He knew that Slayton, who’d spent twenty-three years with NASA, did not leave millions behind for his family. Shepard figured strong book sales could help Bobbie and her family. “He didn’t do all that for himself,” Bobbie recalled. “He did
that for Deke and me.”

  One night, about a year after Moonshot was released, Shepard met in Cocoa Beach with his Mercury Seven friends, now down to five. He, Glenn, Cooper, Carpenter, and Schirra, each of them in their late sixties or early seventies and easing toward retirement, sat at a restaurant table talking about Gus, Deke, and what they’d all do next in life.

  Shepard had sold off his Texas business ventures and his Coors distributorship and consolidated his assets beneath the umbrella of Seven-Fourteen Enterprises, Inc., named for his two space flights. Then, in 1989, he and Louise exchanged their Houston apartment for the perfect semiretirement retreat, a cliff-side house at 1512 Bonaficio Drive in the exclusive, privately owned Pebble Beach community. He and Louise had fallen in love with California’s central coast in the 1950s, when they were stationed nearby—those distant days of earning $12,000 a year. Now their back deck loomed above the sixth, seventh, and eighth holes of the Cypress Point golf course, three of the most spectacular holes in all of golf.

  He seemed perfectly content with the simple life he now lived, a life grounded by golf and charity events and Louise. He and Louise celebrated fifty years of marriage in 1995. On their back deck they could sip coffee each morning and wait for the thick Pacific fog to lift and expose the rocky shores below, the seals and the seabirds, the wind-gnarled cypress trees, the wildflowers, and all the deer and millionaires mingling on the fairways of Pebble Beach.

  A round at one of Pebble Beach’s courses costs at least $350. Nonmembers often waited months for a tee time, and fanatics had been known to arrive at 2 A.M. to wait in front of the pro shop in hopes that one of the day’s players had canceled. Shepard could play there anytime he wanted. The Pebble Beach pro shop would call Shepard late in the day if they had an opening, and Shepard would drive down—in the sky-blue Camaro convertible he’d swapped for his Corvette—for a twilight round. Or he’d impress an old Navy buddy by getting a morning tee time ten minutes before the place officially opened.