Sally Ride

by Lynn Sherr

  Specifically, to Menlo Park, where a small house on a quiet street became her occasional refuge from the blare of publicity. Molly Tyson lived there, with her partner, and Sally felt safe with them. She’d come to lie low, she told them, because NASA had indicated that turning down Bob Hope was like refusing the Pope. And she joined in whatever the activity: softball practice, a margarita party, charades, or a twelve-mile run alongside Molly’s partner, who was training for a marathon. Sally completed the run without any practice. Bill Colson, her old beau, stopped by to grill a big salmon. When the party got too crowded, Sally would slip off to escape the fuss. Friends, she noted bluntly but briefly in her notebook, take “photos/show you off.” Sally “welcome[d] hiding vs. too many activities.” But overall, it was a comfort zone. Sally called it her “hideout.”

  America’s new favorite astronaut, whose picture was pinned on an incalculable number of teenage bulletin boards and whose achievement now inspired so many big dreams, felt most authentic, not on national TV clowning about her flight with a comedian, but hanging out with her friends, gay and straight, where no one asked for her autograph. In trying to tame the double-edged sword of fame, Sally was coming to grips with her own needs. Ambivalent about her celebrity, she was considering her options.

  “I think that Sally did want fame and success,” Bill Colson tells me, “but did not want to have to explain what she had accomplished to get there. She enjoys the attention she is getting, as long as she can keep observers at a distance. She has this kind of need to be in the background and the foreground both. She’d like everybody out there to know about Sally Ride, but not have to deal with them every day.”

  There might have been a glimmer of that when she visited with us in New York earlier that summer. One night, when her picture was on the cover of every magazine at every newsstand and we were valiantly protecting her from unwanted attention, Sally came to dinner with us, along with Billie Jean King and a few others. At the end of the meal, the waiter came by our table with a pen and asked King to sign the menu. My husband, who adored Sally, teased that he saw a flash of green jealousy in her bright blue eyes.

  None of which would have changed her mind about Bob Hope’s show. The incident didn’t surprise anyone, least of all Gerry Griffin. “She was a person of principle, stuck to her guns,” he tells me with admiration. “A strong personality who knew what she wanted to do, and how to do it. It’s the same characteristic that led her to do such a fantastic job with the robot arm and all of that. If she didn’t understand something, she’d ask. If someone told her something she didn’t believe, she said so. Sally didn’t suffer fools very well.”

  Or the US State Department.

  INTRIGUE IN BUDAPEST

  In September 1983, Sally took her postflight, praise-the-shuttle tour to Europe, three weeks, eight capital cities. Her moral support this time was pilot Rick Hauck, and together they convinced the brass that it would be healthy to bring their spouses. Then, says Hauck, he and Sally put their heads together and decided, “we’ve got to establish some ground rules with this. For example, no appointment would last more than fifty minutes. We must have a bathroom break every two to three hours. If we’re face-to-face with the public for four hours, we have to have a fifteen-minute downtime where we’re secluded, or away from the public. After six days we need a full day off.” NASA bought it all. It would be a “fascinating and educational but exhausting trip,” Hauck tells me. In London, at the Royal Society, Sally saw the Charter book with Isaac Newton’s signature. At a reception there, a leader of the European Space Agency mentioned that he’d ridden on Space Mountain at Disney World, and asked her how it compared to the real thing. Space Mountain, Sally told him, was much scarier. They dined with the Russian ballet star Natalia Makarova, a space enthusiast. Sally and Steve jogged through Belgrade, then she and Hauck showed their film. They were greeted by Queen Beatrix and Prince Claus in The Hague, and by the King of Norway in the ancestral home of both. “Dolly [Hauck’s wife at the time] and I kind of basked in the radiance of Sally’s celebrity,” he says. “All four of us had fun together.”

  But nothing compared to Sally’s escapade in Budapest.

  They’d been invited to a meeting of the International Astronautical Federation, a chance to promote the US shuttle program to more than 650 space scientists and engineers from some 32 nations, including the Soviet Union, which had just been branded the “Evil Empire” by President Reagan. There was only one caveat: one month earlier, a Korean Air Lines passenger jet en route from New York to Seoul had been shot down by a Soviet military plane, killing all aboard, including a US congressman. The charges of murder and espionage flew back and forth, a tense escalation of the Cold War leading to strict instructions for Sally, Rick and Steve: no mingling with the Soviet cosmonauts. No vodka toasts with the other side. Above all, no photos of our heroes snuggling up to East-West space cooperation. In other words, “show our film, give press conferences, high profile on the one hand,” Sally said, perplexed by the challenge, “but low profile on the other. We didn’t really know how we were going to handle that.”

  The Americans obeyed at first, avoiding the Russians while striking up an acceptable friendship with the Hungarian cosmonaut, Bertalan Farkas. Then, during one reception, Sally felt a tap on her elbow. “And I turned around and there was Svetlana [Savitskaya, the second Soviet woman who had beaten Sally into orbit], who I recognized immediately. And she said, ‘Sally.’ And I said something like, ‘Hello.’ And she said, ‘Congratulations on your flight.’ And I said, ‘Thank you very much, congratulations to you.’ And all the time I was kind of looking over my shoulder, wondering where the cameras were and how I was going to get out of this.” If Hollywood had been orchestrating the scene, the music would have been ominous. Sally was more than keen to speak with her counterpart—they were two of the only three women who had ever flown in space—but feared the questions from reporters that would turn their meeting into an international incident. “We were trying to avoid a story: ‘Female Astronaut Meets Female Astronaut and What Do They Think?’ I didn’t know what to say next, and she didn’t either, so we exchanged smiles and both turned away.”

  Sally never mentioned this incident publicly. But she recorded the intrigue on her cassette player when she returned from Budapest in 1983, an audio account that vibrantly recalls the complexity of Cold War politics.

  Sally spent the next fifteen minutes reassessing. She worried that she’d been rude, continued to feel uncomfortable, reminded herself that she was there representing the State Department. But longed for more conversation.

  Meanwhile, she and Hauck did their jobs: signed autographs, gave interviews, listened to speeches, showed their film, went through receiving lines. But the situation nagged at Sally for another day. It was an uncommon opportunity, and Sally never let a good opportunity pass her by. The next morning, at an event at the Institute for Physics—Hungary’s equivalent of our National Science Foundation—Sally made her move. She approached the Hungarian translator she’d gotten to know, Tamas Gombosi, and said quietly, “You know, I’d really like to get a chance to talk to Svetlana. Do whatever you want with that information.” Gombosi picked right up on it. “Maybe we can arrange that,” he said. “I’ll talk to you tonight at the ambassador’s reception.”

  Now it became a full-blown cloak-and-dagger operation. “I didn’t know what I’d gotten myself into,” Sally said. “I didn’t mention it to either Rick or Steve, just thought I’d wait and see what Tamas came up with. I had the distinct impression that Svetlana wanted to do it.”

  That night, at the embassy reception, Gombosi discreetly informed Sally that she and Steve were invited to Farkas’s apartment, “and there will be other people. Are you interested?” Sally said, “Yes,” and that she’d check with Steve. Gombosi told her to meet him in the hotel lobby at 9:00 p.m.

  When Sally and Steve got back to their room, they discussed the invitation “as much as we thought we could,” Sa
lly said, unsure whether they were being bugged. Steve felt uncomfortable about going, and Sally felt uncomfortable going without him. She went up to Rick Hauck’s room to fill him in, as the senior member of the crew. “Sounds like a great opportunity,” said the man who had piloted Challenger. “You need to go do that.” Sally drifted down to the hotel coffee shop. “And I started to get myself psyched up to meet Tamas in the lobby at nine.”

  By this time, the scene was worthy of Hitchcock. As rain drenched Budapest and darkness veiled their journey, Sally was whisked away in a chauffeured car to an old building that reeked of faded elegance. They walked around back to enter and climbed a set of stairs. Would the secret police be waiting? Or worse yet, a photographer? Would Sally’s little caper send the US to war?

  Not even close. Farkas’s apartment, Sally discovered, was large and comfortable with thick carpets on the floor and … Yes! Rocket pictures on the wall! “Just like us!” Sally said, delighted. “First thing you see was the picture of their launch!” She started to relax.

  When Svetlana arrived a few minutes later, with a male cosmonaut, both women were initially wary. “I tried to put on my friendliest smile,” Sally said, “and they made some joke like, ‘No press!’ We were both obviously a little bit tense and yet very much at ease at the same time. Svetlana came over and sat down in the armchair next to mine.”

  And that was that. The two women immediately connected, chattering away—with Svetlana’s pretty-good English, Tamas’s translations and a smattering of sign language—about everything from their relationships with their crewmates (equally good) to the aerodynamics of their landing (“they didn’t understand ‘no engines’ ”), to the experiments done on Sally’s body (“None”). The latter surprised them. Soviet scientists monitored their cosmonauts’ bodies throughout the flight. But Sally made a “they didn’t get their hands on me” gesture, which led to good-natured mutual agreement on their fear of flight surgeons. They’d all had the same experience sleeping in space (giggling as each demonstrated the way their arms floated up), and neither woman had suffered from space sickness. “Just like us!” was the phrase they all repeated, over and over.

  “There was sort of a code between the two women,” Tamas Gombosi, the coconspirator, tells me. “It was obvious that they understood each other. From the first minute they just showed so much affection for each other.” And wanted to share their stories. Svetlana presented Sally with Russian books, dolls and a scarf—so many presents, Sally felt “outgifted.” They signed autographs for each other, mostly on Soviet first day covers that the cosmonauts had taken into space. Sally pulled out an STS-7 charm that Svetlana could wear as a necklace, and promised her the TFNG shirt she’d worn on the flight—the one she was wearing that evening underneath her blouse. Sally would deliver it to Gombosi the next day.

  At one point, cameras came out, but, sensitive to Sally’s position, they asked if photos were okay. By the end of the evening, she and Svetlana had their arms around each other, and everyone was posing together, the only visual record of a forbidden summit. “We felt a real kinship, a real affinity for each other,” Sally said. “I felt closer to her than I’d felt to anyone in a very long time. Partly because I understood a lot of what she’d been through, and she understood a lot of what I’d been through, and we felt camaraderie. We were sort of the only two people in the world that were in the situation that we’re in, and we seem to be very similar types of people.” When she got home, Sally told Carolyn Huntoon that Svetlana “probably would have made it through our selection process, and I think she probably would have beaten me out. I got the impression that we’re very much alike.”

  Sally stayed at the apartment for six hours, “and the time just flew past. We were all just having a super time.” When the final toasts were over—she and Svetlana drank juice while the men drank vodka—Sally rode back to the hotel in the same car as the Russian cosmonauts. It was 3:00 a.m. The streets of Budapest were deserted. And the secret mission was back under wraps. “Don’t get into a wreck!” they all told the driver, jovially. “An accident,” Sally later observed, “would wipe out both space programs at once.”

  Svetlana made it clear that they shouldn’t enter the lobby together. So they dropped off Sally, and then headed for the garage entrance. The two women hugged. “When I left there, I thought I had a friend for life,” Sally said.

  She never told her USIA sponsors about the evening. Never made an official report about it. And except for some written communications vetted by the government, never spoke to Savitskaya again. She did, however, record in her brief journal that in Europe, she especially enjoyed “getting away from lawyers, decisions, commitments. Just carrying out [the] program—with some amount of freedom … as in NYC.”

  Also, she ate goose liver, a Hungarian delicacy that “really tasted good: Like tender Wienerschnitzel!” Sally hadn’t changed much in twenty-two years.

  • • •

  If Budapest opened Sally’s heart to the opportunities of international cooperation, Oslo reminded her of the battles still to be waged. Not Oslo itself, nor its country—she enjoyed being back in the land of her ancestors, buying a Norwegian sweater to show off her heritage and some postage stamps for her still growing collection.

  What alienated her (and Hauck) was their meeting with the US ambassador, Mark Austad, a former radio and TV commentator (known as Mark Evans) who invited them to his home for a luncheon. While giving them a tour of the house before the meal, he noted that it was their last stop on a grueling tour. “I’m sure it’s been a tiring journey,” he said. “I guess it’s like rape. If it’s inevitable, you might as well lie back and enjoy it.” Hauck says he and Sally looked at each other in shock. “Our jaws dropped. We were speechless. You could see the color drain from the ambassador’s face as he realized he’s just made a very big mistake.”

  Somehow, they made it through the buffet, after which the ambassador got up to attend the opening of the Norwegian parliament.

  “Sally, to her credit, said, ‘Mr. Ambassador, before you leave I have a word of advice for you.’

  “He said, ‘Yes. What is that?’

  “She said, ‘Back in the United States, rape jokes aren’t funny anymore.’ ”

  INSPIRATION

  “A,” Sally says, standing in her flight suit with a winning smile. Then, “Astronaut,” completing the Sesame Street equation, at which point, through the magic of television, she levitates up and off the screen thanks to a personal rocket at her feet. The look on her face is pure bliss.

  That’s the part Sally enjoyed. That’s what made the mission, and the publicity, finally, gratifying.

  “I saw in the eyes of the girls and the women and the grandmothers that I met, what it meant to them,” she told me in 2008 during a twenty-fifth anniversary celebration of her flight. “And I knew it was important, but I didn’t realize the emotional impact it had on so many women, just realizing this was something a woman could do that no one thought she could do. And I think it changed a lot of attitudes, it changed a lot of aspirations. For young women in college it made them think about their careers differently.”

  Sally had invited me to the party at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, and I found her unusually reflective. Her flight, she said, “was a moment in history when women in the United States saw that they could do something that they hadn’t thought of before. That women were viewed in a different way, and it didn’t have to be me, but there had to be a first woman for that perception to be realized.”

  “But we’re glad it was you,” I said, unnecessarily.

  “I’m glad it was me!” she agreed.

  Individual moments drove it home for her. The female translator in the former Yugoslavia who “started crying when she met me because I was someone who had broken barriers that she had never even dreamed of. That was very emotional for her, and it really made an impact on me.” The eight-year-old girl in the audience who “raises her hand to ask me
what she needs to do to become an astronaut. I like that. It’s neat! Why? Because now there really is a way. Now it’s possible!”

  As columnist Ellen Goodman wrote, Sally was not just an astronaut, she was a First Woman, a status that carried “a load of other women’s frustrations and hopes… . First Women bear a special responsibility to those who didn’t come before them and those who may—or may not—come later… . Being a full-fledged First Woman means taking every step for womankind.”

  Sally’s friend Barbara Barrett, with whom she would later connect over their shared love of aviation and science, connects it to the perceptions of 1980s America: The way people thought then, she says, “If a man does something badly or well, it’s the man. If a woman doesn’t do it well, it’s the gender.”

  Sally had seen it with the flowers on her return. People were “watching me carefully and measuring what I did. I felt a huge responsibility to do the right thing, to be a strong role model for women. Not that I had planned to do anything crazy or irresponsible after my flight, but more than ever, I was conscious of all those people out there—especially young girls—looking to me as the model I’d never had myself, of what they might become.” She hadn’t understood fully “how much it would mean to so many women, to see a woman become an astronaut. I think until we see a woman like ourselves accomplish something, it’s hard to form the pictures in our head that allow us to imagine doing such a thing ourselves.”