The Right Stuff

6 — On the Balcony

From the very beginning this "astronaut" business was just an unbelievable good deal. It was such a good deal that it seemed like tempting fate for an astronaut to call himself an astronaut, even though that was the official job description. You didn't even refer to the others as astronauts. You'd never say something such as "I'll take that up with the other astronauts." You'd say, "I'll take that up with the other fellows" or "the other pilots." Somehow calling yourself an "astronaut" was like a combat ace going around describing his occupation as "combat ace." This thing was such an unbelievable good deal, it was as if "astronaut" were an honorific, like "champion" or "superstar," as if the word itself were one of the infinite variety of goodies that Project Mercury was bringing your way.

And not just goodies in the crass sense, either. It had all the things that made you feel good, including the things that were good for the soul. For long stretches you'd bury yourself in training, in blissful isolation, good rugged bare-boned isolation, in Low Rent surroundings, in settings that even resembled hallowed Edwards in the old X-1 days, and with that same pioneer spirit, which money cannot buy, and with everybody pitching in and working endless hours, so that rank meant nothing, and people didn't even have the inclination, much less the time, to sit around and make the usual complaints about government work.

And then, just about the time you were entering a good healthy state of exhaustion from the work, they would take you out of your isolation and lead you up to that balcony that all fighter jocks secretly dreamed of, the one where you walked out before the multitudes like the Pope, and… it actually happened! The people of America cheered their brains out for thirty minutes or so, and then you went back into your noble isolation for more work… or for a few proficiency runs at nailing down the holy coordinates of the fighter jock's life, which were, of course, Flying & Drinking and Drinking & Driving and the rest of it. These things you could plot on the great graph of Project Mercury in the most spectacular way, with the exception of the first: Flying. The lack of flying time was troubling, but the other items existed in such extraordinary dimensions that it was hard to concentrate on it at first. Any man who wasn't above a little regrouping now and then, to keep the highly trained mechanism from being wound up too tight, to "maintain an even strain," in the Schirra parlance, found himself in absolute Fighter Jock Heaven. But even the rare pilot who was aloof from such cheap thrills, such as the deacon, John Glenn, found plenty of goodies to even out the strain of hard work and mass adoration.

Each of them had an eye on Glenn, all right. Glenn's own personal conduct was a constant reminder of what the game was really all about. To all but Scott Carpenter, and perhaps one other, the way Glenn was going about this thing was irritating.

The seven of them were stationed at Langley Air Force Base in the Tidewater section of Virginia on the James River, about 150 miles due south of Washington. Langley had been the experimental facility of the old National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and was now the headquarters of NASA's Space Task Group for Project Mercury. Every morning they could count on seeing John Glenn up early, out on the grounds, in the middle of everything, where nobody could miss him, doing his road-work. He'd be out there in full view, on the circular driveway of the Bachelor Officers Quarters, togged out in his sweatsuit, his great freckled face flaming red and shining with sweat, going around and around, running a mile, two miles, three miles, there was no end to it, in front of everybody. It was irritating, because it was so unnecessary. There had been a vague medical directive to the effect that each of them would engage in at least four hours of "unsupervised exercise" per week, but that was the last that was heard of. The medical staff assigned to Project Mercury were mainly young military doctors, a bit dazzled by the mission, some of them, and they were not about to call an astronaut on the carpet and demand an accounting of his four hours. Fighter jocks, as a breed, put physical exercise very low on the list of things that made up the right stuff. They enjoyed the rude animal health of youth. They put their bodies through dreadful abuses, often in the form of drinking bouts followed by lack of sleep and mortal hangovers, and they still performed like champions. ("I don't advise it, you understand, but it can be done"—provided you have the right stuff, you miserable pudknocker.) Most agreed with Wally Schirra, who felt that any form of exercise that wasn't fun, such as waterskiing or handball, was bad for your nervous system. But here was Glenn, pounding through everybody's field of vision with his morning roadwork, as if he were preparing for the championship fight.

The good Marine didn't just do his roadwork and leave it at that, either. Oh, no. The rest of them had their families installed at Langley Air Force Base or at least in the Langley vicinity. Gordon Cooper and Scott Carpenter and their families were packed into apartments on the base, the usual sort of worn-out base housing that junior officers rated. Wally Schirra, Gus Grissom, and Deke Slayton lived in a rather sad-looking housing development on the other side of the Newport News airport. Around the development was a stucco wall of the color known as glum ocher. Alan Shepard and his family lived a little farther away in Virginia Beach, where they happened to be living when he was chosen for Project Mercury. But Glenn… Glenn has his family housed 120 miles away in Arlington, Virginia, outside of Washington, and at Langley he stays in the Bachelor Officers Quarters, the BOQ, and does his running out front in the driveway. If this had been some devilishly clever scheme for him to get away from home and hearth and indulge in Drinking & Driving & so forth, that would have been one thing. But he wasn't the type. He was living in a bare room with nothing but a narrow bed and an upholstered chair and a little desk and a lamp and a lineup of books on astronomy, physics, and engineering, plus a Bible. On the weekends he would faithfully make his way home to his wife, Annie, and the children in an ancient Prinz, a real beat-up junker that was about four feet long and had perhaps forty horsepower, the sorriest-looking and most underpowered automobile still legally registered to any fighter pilot in America. A jock with any natural instincts at all, with any true devotion to the holy coordinates, either possessed or was eating his heart out for the sort of car that Alan Shepard had, which was a Corvette, or that Wally Schirra had, which was a Triumph, i.e., a sports car, or some kind of hot car, anyway, something that would enable you to hang your hide out over the edge with a little class when you reached the Driving juncture on the coordinates several times a week, as was inevitable for everyone but someone like John Glenn. This guy was putting on an incredible show! He was praying in public. He was presenting himself in their very midst as the flying monk or whatever the Presbyterian version of a monk was. A saint, maybe; or an ascetic; or maybe just the village scone crusher.

Being a good Presbyterian, John Glenn knew that praying in public was no violation of the faith. The faith even encouraged it; it set a salubrious example for the public. Nor did John Glenn feel the slightest discomfort because now, in post-World War II America, virtue was out of style. Sometimes he seemed to enjoy shocking people with his clean living. Even when he was no more than nine years old, he had been the kind of boy who would halt a football game to read the riot act to some other nine-year-old who said "Goddamn it" or "Aw shit" when a play didn't go right. This was an unusual gesture even where he grew up, which was New Concord, Ohio, but not so extraordinary as it might have been a lot of other places. New Concord was a sort of town, once common in America, whose peculiar origins have tended to disappear in the collective amnesia as tout le monde strives to be urbane. Which is to say, it began as a religious community. A hundred years ago any man in New Concord with ambitions that reached as high as feed-store proprietor or better joined the Presbyterian Church, and some of the awesome voltage of live Presbyterianism still existed when Glenn was growing up in the 1920's and 1930's. His father was a fireman for the B & O Railroad and a good churchgoing man and his mother was a hardworking churchgoing woman, and Glenn went to Sunday school and church and sat through hundreds of interminable Presbyterian prayers, and the church and the faith and the clean living served him well. There was no contradiction whatsoever between the Presbyterian faith and ambition, even soaring ambition, even ambition grand enough to suit the invisible ego of the fighter jock. A good Presbyterian demonstrated his election by the Lord and the heavenly hosts through his success in this life. In a way, Presbyterianism was tailor-made for people who intended to make it in this world, as well as on the Plains of Heaven; which was a good thing, because John Glenn, with his sunny round freckled country-boy face, was as ambitious as any pilot who had ever hauled his happy burden of self-esteem up the pyramid.

So Glenn went pounding around the driveway of the BOQ of Langley Air Force Base in his sweatsuit, doing his roadwork, and he frankly didn't care if most of the others didn't like it. The running was good for him on several levels. At thirty-seven he was the oldest of the fellows, and there was a little more pressure on him to demonstrate that he was in good condition. Besides that, he had a tendency to put on weight. From the waist up he was of only average size and musculature and, in fact, had surprisingly small hands. But his legs were huge, real kegs, muscular and fleshy at the same time, and he tended to pack on weight in the thighs. He was pushing 185 when he was selected for this thing, and he could well afford to get down to 170 or even less. As for living in the BOQ… why not? He and his wife, Annie, had bought their house in Arlington because the children would be in excellent public schools there. Why transplant them again when he would be on the road half the time and probably wouldn't see them except on weekends, anyway?

If it looked to the others as if he were living a monastic life… that wouldn't hurt too much… Competition was competition, and there was no use pretending it didn't exist. He already had an advantage over the other six because of his Marine flying record and the way he tended to dominate the publicity. He was ready to give a 110 percent on all fronts. If they wanted four hours of unsupervised exercise per week—well, give them eight or twelve. Other people could think what they wanted; he happened to be completely sincere in the way he was going about this thing.

The goal in Project Mercury, as in every important new flight project, was to be the pilot assigned to make the first flight. In flight test that meant your superiors looked upon you as the man who had the right stuff to challenge the unknowns. In Project Mercury the first flight would also be the most historic flight. They had been told that the first flight would be suborbital. There might be as many as ten or eleven suborbital flights, going to an altitude of about one hundred miles, fifty miles above the commonly accepted boundary line between the earth's atmosphere and space. These flights would not go into orbit, because the rocket they would be using, the Redstone, could not generate enough power to take a capsule to orbital speed, which would be about 18,000 miles per hour. The capsule would go up and come down in a big arc, like an artillery shell's. As it came over the top of the arc, the astronaut would experience about five minutes of weightlessness. These suborbital flights were scheduled to begin in mid-1960, and all seven pilots would get a crack at them.

Other men would no doubt go farther into space, into earth orbit and beyond. But they, in turn, would be chosen from the first men to fly suborbitally; so the first astronaut would be the one the world remembered. When a man realized something like that, there was no use being shy about the opportunity he had. Glenn had not gotten this far in his career by standing still in a saintly fashion and waiting for his halo to be noticed. When he reached Korea, flying strafing and bombing missions in support of Marine ground troops, he realized that the biggest accolade was being assigned to Air Force fighter squadrons, on loan (like Schirra), for air-to-air combat up at the Yalu River. So he had gone after that assignment and had gotten it and had shot down three MiGs during the last few days of the war. As soon as the war ended, he realized that flight test was the hot new arena and had gone straight to his superiors and asked to be assigned to the Navy's Patuxent River Test Pilot School, and they sent him there. He had been in flight test barely three years when he dreamed up the F8U transcontinental run. He dreamed it up himself, as a major in the Marines! Although everyone knew it was possible, no one had ever made a sustained coast-to-coast flight at an average speed of greater than Mach 1. Glenn developed the whole scheme, the aerial rendezvous with three different air refueling tankers, the way he would dive down to 22,000 feet to meet them, the whole thing. He pulled it off on July 16, 1957, flying from Los Angeles to Floyd Bennett Field in New York, in three hours and twenty-three minutes. The word was that there were some test pilots who were put out because he got the assignment. They seemed to think they had done the major test work on the F8U, and so forth and so on. But it was his idea! He got it launched! If he hadn't put himself forward, it wouldn't have happened at all. Last year, 1958, it was obvious to him that all the services were working on the problems of manned space flight. There was no Project Mercury yet, and no one knew who would be running the show when a manned program began. All he knew was that it was not likely to be the Marines but he wanted to play a part in it. So he had himself assigned to the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics. He volunteered for runs on the Navy's human centrifuge machine at Johnsville, Pennsylvania, exploring the high g-forces associated with rocket flight. By March of this year, 1959, just a month before the seven of them were selected as astronauts, he had been at the McDonnell Aircraft plant in St. Louis as a representative of the Bureau of Aeronautics on a NASA Mockup Review Board, reviewing progress of the manufacture of the Mercury capsule. He didn't know just how the seven of them were selected… but obviously all that hadn't hurt his chances.

And now the ante had been raised once more, and he was after nothing short of being the first man to go into space. NASA would have to beat the Russians to it, of course, for him or any other American to be first. But that was one of the things that made it exhilarating, exhilarating enough even to endure this sweaty pounding over a salty pine-tag circular driveway in Tidewater, Virginia. There was the same sort of esprit—usually called patriotism but better described as joie de combat—that had existed during the Second World War and, among pilots (and practically no one else), during the Korean War. Project Mercury was officially a civilian undertaking. But it struck Glenn as being like a new branch of the armed services. All seven of them were still in the military, drawing military pay, even though they wore civilian clothes. There was a warlike urgency and priority about the whole enterprise. And in this new branch of the military no one outranked you. It was almost too good to be true.

On the organization chart the seven of them had superiors. They reported to Robert Gilruth, the head of the new Space Task Group, who was a subordinate of Hugh Dryden, the deputy administrator of NASA. Gilruth was a superb engineer and a fine man; he had literally written the book on the handling characteristics of aircraft, the first scientific treatise on the subject, "Requirements for Satisfactory Flying Qualities of Airplanes," NACA Report No. 755, 1937, which had become a classic. He was a big, bald, shy man with a reedy voice. Most recently he had been head of the NACA Pilotless Aircraft Research Division, which had experimented with unmanned rockets. Gilruth was not used to marching the troops and certainly not a group of ambitious pilots. He was no Vince Lombardi. He was a genius among engineers, but he was not the type to take seven colossal stars who were suddenly the most famous pilots in America and mold them into Bob Gilruth's Astroteam.

They were so famous, so revered, so lavishly fussed and worried over at all times that they were without peers in this new branch of the military. Everywhere they went in their travels people stopped what they were doing and gave them a certain look of awe and sympathy. Sympathy… because our rockets all blow up. It was a nice, friendly, warm look, all right, and yet it was strange. It was a sort of glistening smile with tears and joy suffusing it; both tears and joy. In fact, it was an ancient look, from the primordial past, never seen in America before. It was the smile of homage and astonishment—at such bravery!—that had been given to single-combat warriors, in advance, on account, before the fact, since time was.

Well… Glenn was ready; he was ready for election; he was ready to be the first to go into the heavens when that debt of homage and honor and glistening faces came due.

One of the people who beamed that look at them with a sincere devotion was a Washington lawyer named Leo DeOrsey. Walter Bonney, the NASA public affairs officer who had run the press conference, had seen the frenzy of publicity building up around the seven men and concluded that they needed some expert help in their new role as celebrities. He approached DeOrsey. DeOrsey was a tax lawyer. Harry Truman had once considered making him head of the Internal Revenue Service. He had represented many show-business celebrities, including President Eisenhower's friend Arthur Godfrey. So the seven of them wound up having dinner with DeOrsey in a private room at the Columbia Country Club outside of Washington. DeOrsey was an affable gentleman with a little round pot belly. He had terrific clothes. He put on a long face and related how he had been approached by Bonney. He said he was willing to represent them.

"I insist on only two conditions," he said.

Glenn thought to himself, "Well, here it comes."

"One," said DeOrsey, "I will accept no fee. Two, I will not be reimbursed for expenses."

He kept the grave look on his face for a moment. And then he smiled. There were no catches and no angles. He was obviously sincere. He thought they were terrific and felt tickled pink to be involved with them at all. He couldn't do enough for them. And that was the way it went with Leo DeOrsey from that evening onward. He couldn't have been straighter or more generous.

DeOrsey proposed that the book and magazine rights to their personal stories be put up for sale to the highest bidder. Bonney was sure the President and NASA would allow it, because several military men had made such an arrangement since the Second World War, most notably Eisenhower himself. The selling point for NASA would be that if the seven of them sold exclusive rights to one organization, then they would have a natural shield against the endless requests and intrusions by the rest of the press and would be better able to concentrate on their training.

Sure enough, NASA approved the idea, the White House approved it, and DeOrsey started getting in touch with magazines, setting $500,000 as the floor for bids. The one solid offer—$500,000—came from Life, and DeOrsey closed the deal. Life had an excellent precedent for the decision. Few people remembered, but The New York Times had bought the rights to Charles Lindbergh's personal story before his famous transatlantic flight in 1927. It worked out splendidly for both parties. Having bought an exclusive, the Times devoted its first five pages to Lindbergh the day after his flight and the first sixteen the day after he returned from Paris, and all other major newspapers tried their best to keep up. In return for Life's exclusive rights to their personal stories and their wives', the astronauts would share the $500,000 evenly; the sum amounted to just under $24,000 a year for each man over the three years Project Mercury was scheduled to run, about $70,000 in all.

For junior officers with wives and children, used to struggling along on $5,500 to $8,000 a year in base pay, plus another $2,000 in housing and subsistence allowances and perhaps $1,750 in extra flight pay, the sum was barely even imaginable at first. It wasn't real. They wouldn't see any of it for months, in any case… Nevertheless, the goodies were the goodies. A career military officer denied himself and his family many things… with the understanding that when the goodies came along, they would be accepted and shared. It was part of the unwritten contract. The Life deal even provided them with foolproof protection against the possibility that their personal stories might become all-too-personal. Although written by Life, the stories would appear in the first person under their own by-lines… "by Gus Grissom"… "by Betty Grissom"… and they would have the right to eliminate any material they objected to. NASA, moreover, would have the same right. So there was nothing to keep the boys from continuing to come across as what they had looked like at the first press conference: seven patriotic God-fearing small-town Protestant family men with excellent backing on the home front.

Here in the summer of 1959 that was fine with Life and with the rest of the press, for that matter. Americans seemed to be deriving profound satisfaction from the fact that the astronauts turned the conventional notions of Glamour upside down. It was assumed—and the Genteel Beast kept underlining the point—that the seven astronauts were the greatest pilots and bravest men in America precisely because of the wholesome circumstances of their backgrounds: small towns, Protestant values, strong families, the simple life. Henry Luce, Life's founder and boss of bosses, had not played a major role, other than parting with the money, in making the astronaut deal, but eventually he came to look upon them as his boys. Luce was a great Presbyterian, and the Mercury astronauts looked like seven incarnations of Presbyterianism. This was no rural-American miracle, however. It was John Glenn who had set the moral tone of the Astronaut at the first press conference. The others had diplomatically kept their mouths shut ever since. From the Luces and Restons on down, the Press, that ever-seemly Victorian Gent, saw the astronauts as seven slices of the same pie, and it was mom's pie, John Glenn's mom's pie, from the sturdy villages of the American heartland. The Gent thought he was looking at seven John Glenns.

Among the seven instant heroes John Glenn's light shone brightest. Probably the least conspicuous, using that same measure, was Gordon Cooper. Cooper was a thin, apparently guileless soul, handsome in a down-home manner. He was from Shawnee, Oklahoma. He had a real Oklahoma drawl. He was also the youngest of the seven, being thirty-two years old. He had never flown in combat, nor had his test work at Edwards been of the sort that attracted much notice. Scott Carpenter was no further up the great ziggurat of flying, of course, but Carpenter was not at all reluctant to talk about his own relative lack of experience in jets, and so on. What seemed to annoy some of the boys was that none of the foregoing, obvious as it surely was, fazed Gordon Cooper in the slightest.

Two people who sometimes seemed to get impatient with Cooper were his Air Force comrades Gus Grissom and Deke Slayton. Grissom and Slayton had become great pals practically from the day they were selected as astronauts. They were from out of the same grim clay. Slayton was raised on a farm in western Wisconsin, up near the town of Sparta and the Elroy Sparta State Park Trail. He was taller than Grissom, more rugged, rather handsome, in fact, and quite intelligent, once you penetrated the tundra. When the subject was flying, his expression lit up, and he radiated confidence and had all the wit and charm and insights you could ask for. In other situations, however, he had Grissom's lack of patience for party manners and small talk and Grissom's way of lapsing into impenetrable blank stares, as if some grim wintertime north-country Lutheran cloud of Original Sin were passing in front of his face. Deke had started flying in the Second World War, when the Air Force was still part of the Army. In the Army one was continually around people who spoke Army Creole, a language in which there were about ten nouns, five verbs, and one adjective, or participle, or whatever it was called. There always seemed to be a couple of good buddies from Valdosta or Oilville or some place sitting around saying:

"I tol'im iffie tried to fuck me over, I was gonna kick'is fuckin' ass, iddnat right?"

"Fuckin' A."

"Soey kep'on fuckin' me over and I kicked 'is fuckin' ass in fo'im, iddnat right?"

"Fuckin' A."

"An' so now they tellin' me they gon' th'ow my fuckin' ass inna fuckin' stookade! You know what? They some kinda fuckin' me over!"

"Fuckin' A well tol', Bubba."

Now that Deke was all of a sudden a celebrity, there were people who knew him who cringed every time he got near a microphone. They were afraid he was going to Army Creole the nationwide TV and scorch the brains of half the people of the U.S.A. The truth was, Deke was far too sharp for that. He was okay in Gus's book. They lived just two doors away from each other at Langley, and if they were both at home on the weekend, they usually did something together, such as go hunting or wangle a T-33 from Langley Air Force Base and fly cross-country, taking turns at the controls. Sometimes they would fly all the way to California and back, and it was likely that if they exchanged a total of forty sentences, transcontinental, they would come back feeling like they'd had a hell of an animated conversation and a deep talk.

Just a couple of years ago, at Wright-Patterson, it was Gus and Gordo—as Gordon Cooper was known—who had been the great weekend flying buddies. Then Gordo had been transferred to Edwards, where Deke Slayton happened to be. And now that all three of them were in the same corps, this extraordinary new corps of astronauts, there were nights when the others would hear Cooper's Oklahoma drawl getting cranked up… and the gorge would rise… They would all be knocking back a few at somebody's house, some Saturday night, and they would hear Cooper starting to talk about something extraordinary that happened when he was testing the F-106B or whatever at Edwards… and the blood would come into somebody's baleful eyes, and he'd say, "I'll tell you what Gordo did at Edwards. He was in engineering." The way engineering was pronounced, you would have thought Gordo had been a quartermaster or a drum major or a chaplain.

Deke Slayton took pride in the fact that he was in the hot branch of flight test at Edwards, which was Fighter Operations. The pilots in Fighter Ops at Edwards pushed the outsides of the envelopes of the hottest new airplanes made, the most recent examples being the Century series, of which Gordo's F-106B was one. But to be in engineering was to be an also-ran. Gus and Gordo remained friends and even did some rat-racing in their cars together and, later on, in speedboats. He was so friendly and easygoing, it was hard not to like the man. But sometimes Gus would cluck and fume over Gordo's yarns, too.

And none of this fazed Gordo in the slightest! He seemed to be oblivious of it all! He just went on drawling and lollygagging along as if he were sitting in the catbird seat the whole time! He was also given to sounding off now and then in ways the rest of them just couldn't comprehend. Like that business of the flight pay!

The truth was that none of them, not even Gus, who knew him fairly well, understood Cooper's particular makeup. Cooper may have had his blind spots, but if so, it was the blindness of the fighter jock resolutely making his way up the mighty ziggurat. So what if, by outward standards, he had not had the most brilliant career of all the seven astronauts? The day was young! He was only thirty-two! Cooper's fighter jock self-esteem seemed to be like a PAR lamp. It was as if wherever he landed, the light shone round about him, and that was the place to be. Cooper knew as well as anyone else that it was more prestigious to be in Fighter Ops than in engineering at Edwards. But once he was in engineering, the light shone round about him, and the picture of him in that place was good. As a pilot in engineering you saw the project from both sides, from the design and administrative side as well as from the test pilot's side. It was like being a project manager who also flew… that was what it was like… Much of Cooper's fireproof confidence was based on the fact that he was "a natural-born stick-and-rudder man," as the phrase went. When it came to sheer aplomb in controlling a winged aircraft, there was probably no other astronaut who could outdo him. His father had been a colonel in the old Army Air Force, a career officer, and Cooper had started flying before he was sixteen. He had met his wife, Trudy, at Hickam Field after he had enrolled in the University of Hawaii. She was also a pilot. Flying as like breathing to Cooper. He seemed to feel absolutely immune to the ordinary dangers of flight; in any event, he was absolutely cool when it came to dealing with them. As far as his career went, he was never troubled by doubts. It was only a matter of time before everything would go his way. Of that he seemed to be convinced.

When the tests for selection of astronauts began at Lovelace and Wright-Patterson… well, it was obvious, wasn't it? Everything was now going his way. He never had the slightest doubt that he would be chosen. His relative lack of credentials didn't trouble him at all. He would be chosen! He could tell! When it came to things like the rigors of the physical tests at Lovelace, he went through it all with a knowing wink. Things like scuttling down a corridor with barium exploding out of your tail—he figured it was intentionally set up as part of the stress testing. Nothing to it, once you understood the drill. Stress? He was so relaxed, the psychologists giving the stress tests at Wright-Patterson could hardly believe it. As soon as the tests at Wright-Pat were completed, Cooper told his commanding officer at Edwards that he had better look for a replacement for him. He was going to be chosen as an astronaut. This was more than a month before the choices were actually made.

Cooper turned out to be neither so naive nor so guileless as some thought. From the beginning, in the interview sessions, the NASA psychologists had asked the candidates for astronaut many questions about their family lives. Quite aside from any possible public-relations considerations, there was a well-known theory in the psychology of flight to the effect that marital discord was a major cause of erratic behavior among pilots and often led to fatal accidents. The sound instincts of the career officer led Cooper to respond that his family life, with Trudy and the children, was real fine, terrific; regulation issue. This wasn't likely to bear much checking into, however, inasmuch as Cooper and Trudy were not living in the same house or even in the same latitude. They had separated; Trudy and the children were living down near San Diego, while he remained at Edwards. Clearly it was time for a reconciliation. Cooper took a quick trip to San Diego… he talked a whole rope… a veritable lasso… the separation, his prospects with NASA, and so on… In any case, Trudy and their two daughters returned to Edwards, and Cooper had the American dream back intact, under one roof, before the final round of the selection process, and nobody at NASA was the wiser.

After Cooper was selected, one of the Life writers brought up the point that he had less experience than most of the other astronauts. Cooper was not fazed for a moment. He said that he was also younger than the others and would probably be the only one of them to fly to Mars.

The only side of the whole deal that appeared to shake Cooper's confidence was the p.r. side of it, the publicity routine, the trips here and there, where various local worthies put you at the head table and whacked you on the back and asked you to get up and "just say a few words." Most of the trips were to cities where components of the Mercury system were being manufactured, such as St. Louis, where the capsule was being built at the McDonnell factory, or San Diego, where the Atlas rocket was being built at Convair. St. Louis, San Diego, Akron, Dayton, Los Angeles—somebody was always suggesting that you "just say a few words."

It was on such occasions that a man realized most acutely that America's seven astronauts were not by any means identical. Glenn seemed to eat this stuff up. He couldn't get enough grins or handshakes, and he had a few words filed away in every pocket. He would even come back to Langley and write cards to workers he had met on the assembly line, giving them little "attaboys," as if they were all in this thing together, partners in the great adventure, and he, the astronaut, would never forget his, the welding inspector's, beaming mug. The idea, much encouraged by NASA, was that the personal interest of the astronaut would infuse everyone working for the contractors with a greater concern for safety, reliability, efficiency.

Oddly enough, it seemed to work. Gus Grissom was out in San Diego in the Convair plant, where they were working on the Atlas rocket, and Gus was as uneasy at this stuff as Cooper was. Asking Gus to "just say a few words" was like handing him a knife and asking him to open a main vein. But hundreds of workers are gathered in the main auditorium of the Convair plant to see Gus and the other six, and they're beaming at them, and the Convair brass say a few words and then the astronauts are supposed to say a few words, and all at once Gus realizes it's his turn to say something, and he is petrified. He opens his mouth and out come the words: "Well… do good work!" It's an ironic remark, implying: "… because it's my ass that'll be sitting on your freaking rocket." But the workers started cheering like mad. They started cheering as if they had just heard the most moving and inspiring message of their lives: Do good work! After all, it's Little Gus's ass on top of our rocket! They stood there for an eternity and cheered their brains out while Gus gazed blankly upon them from the Pope's balcony. Not only that, the workers—the workers, not the management but the workers!—had a flag company make up a huge banner, and they strung it up high in the main work bay, and it said: DO GOOD WORK.

All these people with their smiles of sympathy didn't ask for much. A few words here and there would do fine. Do good work. Nevertheless, that didn't make these public appearances any better for Cooper. He was in the same boat with Gus and Deke, who was also no Franklin D. Roosevelt when it came to public appearances. Everybody latched on to you during these trips, congressmen and businessmen and directors and presidents of this and that. Every hotshot in town wanted to be next to the astronaut. For the first ten or fifteen minutes it was enough for them to breathe the same air you breathed and occupy the same space as your famous body. But then they began looking at you… and waiting… Waiting for what? Well, dummy!—waiting for you to say a few words! They wanted something hot! If you were one of the seven greatest pilots and seven bravest men in America, then obviously you must be fascinating to listen to. Riveting—that was what you were supposed to be. A few war stories, man! And you would sit there with the clutch in, furiously trying to think of something, anything, and it would make you gloomier and gloomier. Your light no longer shone round about you.

It was on such occasions that the three Air Force men, Cooper and Gus and Deke, wouldn't have minded being like Alan Shepard. Shepard was all right. He didn't go for these public appearance stints any more than they did. But Al could shift gears anytime he had to. Al was a Naval Academy man, and if he had to glad-hand and shoot the breeze and trade the small talk with all these congressmen and realty board chairmen and rye distillers and get up and make extemporaneous remarks when called upon, then he could do it. Wally Schirra was another Naval Academy man, and he could play it any way he wanted to, also. Wally was a regular guy, a fighter jock through and through, but he also had the knack of turning on the old Academy charm around strangers. As for the other Navy guy, Carpenter, he wasn't an Academy man, but he was Mr. Charm himself, all the same. He knew how to turn on the party manners.

There was damned little social crap in the Air Force, and that was probably one reason why Cooper liked the blue suit. The "officers and gentlemen" business was kept at a minimum. At most bases the only well-to-do locals who invited Air Force officers to parties were the automobile dealers. They just loved the way those crazy blue-suit sombitches bought those cars and racked them up and then came back and bought some more. In the Air Force there was a nice piece of built-in democracy. Until an officer had reached the level of lieutenant colonel, there was only one way for him to make his mark and advance, and that was by proving himself as a pilot. If he could demonstrate that he had the right stuff in the air, there was nothing, short of gross character defects, that could keep him from rising through the middle ranks. In the Navy Air Force an officer also had to prove himself in the air, but at the test-pilot level the Navy began to insist on "leadership qualities" as well, meaning polish and the rest of it.

There you had a man like Al Shepard, who had come from out of what was sometimes called "the service aristocracy." Which was to say, Al was the son of a career officer. By now you ran into these fellows, the second-generation officers, all over the service. They seemed to make up half the graduates of West Point or Annapolis, like Al and Wally Schirra. Al's father was a retired Army colonel. Wally Schirra's was in effect a service family. His father had been a pilot in the First World War, had then left the service, but then became a civil engineer for the Air Force after the Second World War, helping to rebuild Japanese airfields. You very seldom ran into career officers who were the sons of businessmen, doctors, or lawyers. They steered their sons away from the service. They looked down on it. So what you found were the second-generation officers on the one hand, like Shepard and Schirra, and the sons of workingmen and farmers on the other, fellows like Gus and Deke and John Glenn. Fellows like Shepard and Schirra (and Carpenter) might come from small towns, strictly speaking, but it was a mistake to call them "small-town boys," the way you could apply that term to Gus or Deke, and it showed in the way they could handle themselves in public.

It wasn't long before Cooper began to miss flying, the stick 'n' rudder life, in the worst kind of way. He began to miss it the way another man might have missed food. The daily business of taking a high-performance aircraft aloft and hanging it out over the edge—this was at the heart of the fighter jock's life, even though its importance was never expressed except in the term "proficiency." Pilots devoutly believed that it was necessary to fly out to the edge with regularity in order to maintain proficiency or "decision-making ability." On one level it was a logical enough equivalent to an athlete's concern with staying in shape; but on another it had to do with the mysteries of the right stuff and the ineffable joys of showing the world, and yourself, that you had it. It was damned strange to be in flight training, as America's first astronauts, and yet to be doing no flying themselves, except as passengers.

There was no flying whatsoever on their training agenda! As the weeks went by, all seven men began to be bothered by this, but it was Cooper who voiced the complaint publicly. The early months included a heavy schedule of lectures, on astronomy, rocket propulsion, flight operations, capsule systems, and the trips to the contractors, and to the subcontractors, and to Cape Canaveral, where the rockets would be launched, to Huntsville, Alabama, where Wernher von Braun and his Germans were developing booster rockets, to Johnsville, Pennsylvania, where the human centrifuge was located. There was no end to it. On all these trips Cooper, like the others, had to travel by commercial airline. It seemed as if he spent half of every day standing around airports waiting for luggage or going through his pockets to see how much money he had. Here he was, flying half the month—as a passenger! On top of everything else, he was losing flight pay! It was no laughing matter! DeOrsey was negotiating the Life deal but had not yet closed it. If an Air Force captain kept up his proficiency flying, he stood to receive an extra $145 a month in flight pay, and there was not a sane blue-suiter alive who did not go out and get that flight pay each month unless bedridden or grounded. The extras—my God, it was impossible to explain to an outsider, but these things were built into the psyche of the career officer like first principles! Besides, your family always needed the money. Cooper, like the other six, was being paid by the military, and so he was losing a significant percentage of his income, which hadn't been much to begin with. Not only that, an officer in the military received a mere nine dollars a day in expenses for day trips and twelve dollars a day for overnight trips. To stay in hotels, to eat in restaurants—it was a losing proposition. Especially when they were supposed to be some sort of celebrities. They all felt like the biggest deadbeat celebrities in America. Say you were having lunch with five or six hotshots in Akron, where you went for pressure-suit fittings at B. F. Goodrich. You didn't dare reach for the check. Suppose through delayed psychomotor response or some other dreadful accident they let you have it! The damned thing might be for thirty-five dollars—and there went your family's food money for two weeks… And yet the flight pay itself was the least of it. It was more evidence of the curious non-pilot status of the astronaut. Cooper figured he was spending forty hours a month on commercial airliners in order to go through all this. What he wouldn't have given to have access to a supersonic fighter plane like the F-104B… Gus and Deke were managing to cadge rides on the weekends in T-33's at Langley. But the T-33 was pretty tame stuff, a subsonic trainer. The F-104B was something you could cut loose with. Langley Air Force Base wasn't even equipped to maintain such an aircraft, however. So Cooper was going all the way to McGhee-Tyson in Knoxville, where he had a buddy who could get him signed up for the occasional workout in the F-104B. With a ship like that he could live and breathe… and maintain proficiency and keep in touch with that righteous stuff…

Such thoughts were once more running through his mind as he sat down to lunch one day at Langley, when a reporter for the Washington Star named William Hines joined him and said hello. Well, they talked a little bit and one thing led to another, and pretty soon Cooper was painting the entire picture. When the story appeared in the Star—depicting Cooper's complaint, accurately, as a complaint common to practically all the astronauts—NASA officials were dumbfounded. Overton Brooks's House Committee on Science and Astronautics was dumbfounded. Gordo's fellow deservers of perks and goodies were dumbfounded, even though most of them agreed with him completely. They all looked a trifle petty. Here they were, seven heroes, warriors of the heavens, patriots, and they're all over the press complaining about flight pay and airplane rides…

Overton Brooks sent a committee investigator to Langley to see what the hell was going on. The report he brought back was a masterpiece, a veritable model performance, in the tactful handling of the grousing of his country's first single-combat warriors. "The astronauts," he wrote, "are fully aware of their responsibilities to the project and the American public, particularly with regard to the heroic role they are beginning to assume with the young people of the country. They have imposed upon themselves strict rules of conduct and behavior, which credits them with constructive and mature evaluation of their position as a cynosure of all eyes." The only thing is, they still want their goddamned flight pay and some hot airplanes.

Like most of the other wives, Betty Grissom was stuck at Langley with small children to take care of. At first she had thought she and Gus were at last going to be able to settle in for some ordinary home life, but somehow Gus was away as much as ever. Even when he had the weekends off, he would somehow wander over to Deke's house, and before she knew it, the two of them would be heading off to the base for some "proficiency" flying, and there went another weekend.

If Gus was home for the weekend, he was apt to get in some fast flurries of fatherhood for the benefit of their two boys, Mark and Scott. This might take the form of some good gruff-gus obedience lectures about obeying their mother when he wasn't there. Or it might take the form of something like the floating dock. The development they lived in backed up on a little lake. One weekend Gus set about building a floating dock so that the boys could use the lake as a proper swimming hole. The problem was that the older of the boys, Scott, was only eight, and Betty was afraid they were going to drown back there. She had nothing to worry about, as it turned out. The boys never took to the old swimming hole. They much preferred the swimming pool across the street at the community club. It had a diving board and a concrete apron and clear water and other children to play with. The floating dock remained out back moldering in the lake like a reminder of the kind of fatherhood that the astronaut life began imposing on all seven families.

Betty was not as upset about her husband's protracted absences as a lot of other wives would have been. When they had been stationed at Williams Air Force base, other wives had even put pressure on her not to let Gus have so many weekends off, because it was giving their husbands ideas. But few wives seemed to believe as firmly as Betty did in the unofficial Military Wife's Compact. It was a compact not so much between husband and wife as between the two of them and the military. It was because of the compact that a military wife was likely to say "We were reassigned to Langley"… we, as if both of them were in the military. Under the terms of the unwritten compact, they were. The wife began her marriage—to her husband and to the military—by making certain heavy sacrifices. She knew the pay would be miserably low. They would have to move frequently and live in depressing, exhausted houses. Her husband might be gone for long stretches, especially in the event of war. And on top of all that, if her husband happened to be a fighter pilot, she would have to live with the fact that any day, in peace or war, there was an astonishingly good chance that her husband might be killed, just like that. In which case, the code added: Please omit tears, for the sake of those still living. In return for these concessions, the wife was guaranteed the following: a place in the military community's big family, a welfare state in the best sense, which would see to it that all basic needs, from health care to babysitting, were taken care of. And a flying squadron tended to be the most tightly knit of all military families. She was also guaranteed a permanent marriage, if she wanted it, at least for as long as they were in the service. Divorce—still, as of 1960—was a fatal step for a career military officer; it led to damaging efficiency reports by one's superiors, reports that could ruin chances of advancement. And she was guaranteed one thing more, something that was seldom talked about except in comical terms. Underneath, however, it was no joke. In the service, when the husband moved up, the wife moved up. If he advanced from lieutenant to captain, then she became Mrs. Captain and now outranked all the Mrs. Lieutenants and received all the social homage the military protocol provided. And if her husband received a military honor, then she became the Honorable Mrs. Captain—all this regardless of her own social adeptness. Of course, it was well known that a gracious, well-spoken, small-talking, competent, sophisticated wife was a great asset to her husband's career, precisely because they were a team and both were in the service. At all the teas and socials and ceremonies and obligatory parties at the C.O.'s and all the horrible Officers Wives Club functions, Betty always felt at a loss, despite her good looks and intelligence. She always wondered if she was holding Gus back in his career because she couldn't be the Smilin' & Small-Talkin' Whiz that was required.

Now that Gus had been elevated to this extraordinary new rank—astronaut—Betty was not loath to receive her share, per the compact. It was as if… well, precisely because she had endured and felt out of place at so many teas and other small-talk tests, precisely because she had sat at home near the telephone throughout the Korean War and God knew how many hundreds of test flights wondering if the fluttering angels would be ringing up, precisely because her houses all that time had been typical of the sacrificial lot of the junior officer's wife, precisely because her husband had been away so much—it was as if precisely because that was the way things were, she fully intended to be the honorable Mrs. Captain Astronaut and to accept all the honors and privileges attendant thereupon.

Betty thought the Life deal was terrific. She didn't have to wrestle with the angels over that one for a second. They would be getting just under $25,000 a year from it, a sum almost beyond her imagining after all these glum ocher years. But that was only part of the beauty of this goodie. On the day it had been announced that Gus had been chosen as an astronaut, Betty had been even more terrified than Gus. Gus had only a NASA-controlled press conference to deal with. Betty, with practically no warning, had been mobbed, overrun, at their house in Dayton by the press. They came crawling in through the windows like ravenous termites, like fruit flies, taking pictures and yelling questions. She felt as if she had been engulfed in the monster Small-Talk Tea of all times, and merely the entire country would see her as an unsophisticated Hoosier grit. To her great relief, whatever answers she had come up with emerged as coherent whole sentences, and not at all foolish, in the newspapers the next day, and she looked splendid in the pictures. (Naturally she did not know that the press was an anachronistic colonial animal, a Victorian Gent who was determined to give to all important moments the proper tone.) Still, she wouldn't want to have to go through that sort of thing again. And now she wouldn't! She would only have to talk to Life reporters, and they turned out to be marvelous. They were polite, well-educated, well-dressed, friendly, kind, real ladies and gentlemen. They had no desire whatsoever to make her look bad. Betty and the other wives came bursting forth like great blossoms before the ten million readers of Life in a cover story in the September 21, 1959, issue. Their faces, smooth round white things with coronas of hair, were arranged on the cover like a corsage of flowers with Rene Carpenter's face in the middle—no doubt because the editors regarded her as prettiest. But who is that? Oh, that's Trudy Cooper. And who is that? Oh, that's Jo Schirra. And who is that? Oh, that's… They hardly recognized each other! Then they saw why. Life had retouched the faces of all of them practically down to the bone. Every suggestion of a wen, a hickie, an electrolysis line, a furze of mustache, a bag, a bump, a crack in the lipstick, a rogue cilia of hair, an uneven set of the lips… had disappeared in the magic of photo retouching. Their pictures all looked like the pictures girls can remember from their high-school yearbooks in which so many zits, hickies, whiteheads, blackheads, goopheads, goobers, pips, acne trenches, boil volcanoes, candy-bar pustules, rash marks, tooth-brace lumps, and other blemishes have been scraped off by the photography studio, you looked like you had just healed over from plastic surgery. The headline said: SEVEN BRAVE WOMEN BEHIND THE ASTRONAUTS.

Whether by design or not, Life had seized upon the idea that Luce's fellow Presbyterian John Glenn had put forth at the first press conference: "I don't think any of us could really go on with something like this if we didn't have pretty good backing at home." Pretty good backing? Perfect backing they were going to have: seven flawless cameo-faced dolls sitting in the family room with their pageboy bobs in place, ready to offer any and all aid to the brave lads. There was something crazy about it, but it was marvelous. The week before, in the September 14, 1959, issue, Life had ushered Gus and the other fellows out onto the Pope's balcony with a cover story headlined READY TO MAKE HISTORY that left no doubt whatsoever that these were the seven bravest men and the seven greatest pilots in American history, even if it was necessary to go easy on the details. Now Life was leading Betty and the other wives out onto that balcony.

Betty, for one, did not object to that at all.

They had to let the Life writers and photographers come into their houses and follow them around pretty much anywhere they wanted to, but that turned out to be no particular problem. Pretty soon they all realized they didn't even have to keep their guard up. The Life people were very sympathetic. The men among them obviously had a kind of male awe of Gus and the others; you could even detect a tinge of envy every now and then, because the Life reporters and the fellows were about the same age. But they were loyal. In any case, they were hamstrung, since Gus and Betty and the rest of the men and their wives had the right to censor anything that was going to appear under their names. And don't think they were bashful about it, either! Not for a minute! You'd hear one of the fellows on the telephone going over a manuscript with a Life writer line by line, telling him, in just so many words, what could stay in and what was coming out. Oh, the Life writers sometimes had their own notions of what was candid and colorful and "good copy." They liked to get on such subjects as the rivalries between the boys and such "colorful" matters as Driving & Drinking and the unspoken intrafraternal business of fear and courage… Well, the hell with that! It was not so much that the men wanted to come out sounding like the Hardy Boys in Outer Space—it was just that you'd have to be an idiot to let your personal story actually get personal. Every career military officer, and especially every junior officer, knew that when it came to publicity, there was only one way to play it: with a salute stapled to your forehead. To let yourself be turned into a personality, to become colorful, to be portrayed as an egotist or a rake-hell, was only asking for grief, as many people, including General George Patton, had learned. Scott Carpenter was a case in point. He was open and forthright by nature, and he happened to tell one of the Life writers how his teenage years had been anything but standard-issue astronaut-corps mom's-pie material, especially after his grandfather had died and he had drifted around Boulder raising hell when he felt like it—and some of this stuff came out in Life, without NASA being sent a draft of it, and Scott caught flak for weeks… on the grounds that he had put the program in a bad light.

As far as the wives were concerned, their outlook was the same as that of officers' wives generally, only more so. The main thing was not to say or do anything that reflected badly upon your husband. There wasn't much to worry about with Life on this score. If Betty or any of the others did happen to say anything wrong, she could always remove it before it saw print. As time went by, the Life writers must have despaired of getting any personal stuff at all into their personal stories.

Deke Slayton's wife, Marge, had been divorced, which was a matter of record, but that wasn't about to be printed in Life magazine. A once-divorced astronaut's wife was by now an unthinkable concatenation of words. When the selection process for astronaut had begun, Trudy Cooper, Gordon Cooper's wife, had been living by herself down at San Diego. The writers from Life may have known about it and they may not have. It was a moot point, because in any event there were not going to be any astronauts with washed-up marriages in the pages of Life magazine on the eve of the battle in the heavens with the Russians. The exclusive rights to the "personal stories" of the astronauts and their families that Life had purchased did not encompass any such tangled terrain as that.

And it didn't have to be that personal for them to wave the wand and make it disappear. Look at what they did with John Glenn's wife, Annie. Annie was a good-looking and highly capable woman, but she also had what was referred to as a "slight speech impediment" or "a hesitation in her speech." The truth was that she had a terrific stutter, the classic kind, the kind in which you get hung up on a syllable until you either force it out or run out of breath. Annie was game about it, and she would hang in there until she said what she wanted to say, but it was a real disability—everywhere except in Life magazine. In Life magazine there were going to be no ferocious stammering jackhammer stutters on the home front.

As for Betty, she came out in Life as the thoughtful, articulate, competent, much respected Honorable Mrs. Captain Astronaut. She didn't ask for much more than that. If it pleased them, the people at Life could sit around removing dour grim grit and zits until they earned a place beside the angels in Retouch Heaven.