The Astronaut Wives Club: A True Story (28 page)

Twenty-one days later, the biomedically swabbed astronauts were deemed free of any Moon plague by the time they waltzed into the Apollo 11 Moon Ball, a grand, extravagant, star-studded affair. The guest list was a veritable who’s who of the entire country, including practically every American official in the chain of succession as well as the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court and every member of the cabinet. And of course, there was NASA’s own German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun; Charles Lindbergh; World War I flying ace Eddie Rickenbacker; Mrs. Robert Goddard, the widow of the rocket pioneer; Howard Hughes; and Jackie and Aristotle Onassis. There was also “a delegation from the entertainment world”: Fred Astaire, singing cowboy Gene Autry, and Joan Crawford. LBJ and Lady Bird had sent their regrets.

The astronaut couples were put up at the new nineteen-story, crescent-shaped Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles on the corner of the Avenue of the Stars and Constellation Boulevard, the perfect setting with its space-age design and spectacular Celestial Fountain. Flown in by helicopter, the Nixons were staying in the Presidential Suite, which boasted a view all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Everything was Moon-themed. The band played “Fly Me to the Moon” and “Moon over Miami.” The menu featured the finest foods from around the world, including kiwi fruits from New Zealand and Dungeness crab fingers from Seattle. Two new desserts had been created for the occasion: “Moon Rock” petit fours, and Claire de Lune, a delicately textured marzipan, meringue, and blackberry confection. Everything, like the Moon, was topped with an American flag.

All the astronauts were at the ball, from the Nineteen to the Fourteen to the New Nine to the original Mercury Seven. Eight astronauts had been lost along the way—Ted Freeman, Elliot See, Charlie Bassett, Gus Grissom, Ed White, Roger Chaffee, Ed Givens, and C. C. Williams—but with six months to spare, America had landed on the Moon, fulfilling Kennedy’s goal to reach it before the end of the sixties. It was perhaps the greatest adventure America had ever undertaken, a Manhattan Project for peace.

Outside the hotel, three thousand demonstrators had a different view. After a decade of sit-ins and be-ins, the counterculture thought the occasion perfectly demonstrated the skewed values of the country. With all of the problems ravaging America, the poverty and the inequality rampant across the land, the soldiers dying by the thousands in Vietnam, we had to waste so much brainpower and money going to the
Moon
? And then celebrate it with a decadent “ball” sponsored by the military-industrialist complex? Raising their fists at the arriving limos and smoking pot in the open air, the protesters had somehow managed to drape a huge banner from the upper floors of an office building across the street from the hotel, summing up their point with two words: “Fuck Mars.”

Next up was the “Giant Step” world tour, which would extend over forty-five days and feature visits to multiple heads of state in twenty-three countries. Rechristened goodwill ambassadors, the crewmen and wives of Apollo 11 were briefed by the State Department on the customs of the different countries they’d be visiting: when they should bow or curtsy, whom to address as “Your Majesty” or “Your Royal Highness.” Joan learned that one should never turn her back on a king or a queen. She’d need to remember that.

“Three kings in two days! Do you believe it?” Joan asked her fellow travelers, reviewing their mimeographed itinerary.

Loaded onto Air Force One was her mountain of luggage, ten suitcases bearing tags identifying the specific climate for which each had been packed. Joan also brought along a special travel journal, plastic-protected in green-and-black houndstooth. “Beginning the grand tour,” she wrote on September 29, “arrived Mexico City eleven a.m. local time. Wild motorcade through city. Lunch with President Díaz Ordaz. Didn’t finish till five p.m. Press conference for wives at hotel. Awkward! Reception at Ambassador McBride’s. Saw Brandy. Supper with party here—Gina Lollobrigida. Tired.”

“I thought Gina was interesting,” said Buzz when they returned to their hotel room, a little spice finally peppering his flat manner. Since he’d returned from the Moon, Joan thought that his blue eyes were
different
, a little bluer and a little more animated. Nurse Dee observed that all of the boys came back from space slightly changed: “They have something, a sort of wild look, I would say, as if they had fallen in love with a mystery up there, sort of as if they haven’t gotten their feet back on the ground, as if they regret having come back to us…a rage at having to come back to Earth.” Though Joan had been hoping Buzz would share more of his deep feelings about the experience of walking on the Moon with her, he kept telling her he was sick and tired of talking about the Moon. He’d already said what he had to say at the many press conferences that had followed their twenty-one-day quarantine. “It was a unique, almost mystical environment up there,” he’d said, and it had smelled to Buzz like gunpowder or spent cap pistol caps.

“Gina is giving us a party in Rome,” Buzz told Joan. “I accepted.”

Joan didn’t even try to cover up her irritation. “You did? Well, tell her I don’t want to hear the gory details of her car accident again. And I don’t want to see her
scars
in the ladies’ room again.”

“You got to see her what?”

“Her s-c-a-r-s.”

On just the second day of the grand tour, the White House called Buzz
back
to the States from Bogotá to attend an AFL-CIO convention in Atlantic City. Buzz was not a happy camper. Dr. Bill Carpentier, the Apollo 11 flight surgeon, who was along on the tour, asked him to step aside for a private chat to see if he was feeling okay.

“I don’t think so, Bill. I think I’m overwhelmed.”

“I think you all are.”

The doctor prescribed some pills to help with the anxiety. Buzz unhappily went off for a few days in Atlantic City while Joan continued on to Buenos Aires. She retired to her hotel early one night and wrote in her diary, “Planned to go to a show, but pooped out and had a bowl of soup in my room. Rain and fog.”

The next morning, she found herself in Rio de Janeiro at the Copacabana Palace Hotel accepting three awards for Buzz. The NASA public affairs man congratulated her on her fine performance. At the hotel, alone again, Joan hummed a popular song, “Whaddaya do on a rainy night in Rio”—adding her own lyrics—“without a husband?”

Buzz was to rejoin the troops in four days in the Canary Islands. When Joan arrived at the Maspalomas Hotel after a long nighttime drive, she found Buzz sound asleep in their room. He woke up long enough to eat a sandwich with her, then went back to sleep. She felt as alone with him as she had without him.

In Paris, just before leaving for Amsterdam and Brussels, Joan awoke to find an official telex from the American embassy in the Netherlands in her room—“Queen Juliana insists, repeat, insists it is imperative for women to wear black for audience.” Over breakfast, Joan muttered about Queen Juliana, that “mean old biddy.” Queen Fabiola of Belgium hadn’t made such a request! Joan didn’t want to go to all the trouble of figuring out how to get the one black dress she’d stuck at the back of one of her garment bags, which were stowed on the plane. As it turned out, Queen Juliana was sweet and without airs, and actually favored pastels, leading Joan, conspicuously in pink, to conclude that Pat Collins had played a practical joke by making up and sending that telex.

In Amsterdam, cheers and showers of rose petals and open displays of affection met them. A woman put a bouquet of roses under Buzz’s nose and asked the Moon man how he liked her city. Of course, a microphone was hidden in the bouquet, but at least the gal showed real initiative.

As Air Force One flew to Oslo a couple of days later, Joan was presented with “the Pat Nixon Medal—for displaying the qualities of quiet and determined restraint most evident in our First Lady in not upstaging her husband when the public obviously wanted to see
her
, not Buzz.”

Buzz was really excited to go to Norway. He was proud of his Scandinavian descent. If any country might add him to the pantheon of the gods of Valhalla, it was Norway. The flat behavior of the Norwegians watching the motorcade put Buzz into a blue funk.

When a helicopter took all the Moon couples to the Norwegian defense minister’s lodge high in the mountains, Buzz decided he’d had enough of these “fresh-air fiends” with their cool demeanor. Joan would have to tell their hosts that he was not going to be joining them for dinner. When she came back to their room later that night, Buzz was sitting in an armchair, still in a funk. What was his
problem
? Buzz hadn’t even liked Paris!

She reached for the bottle of scotch, fixed them each a generous nightcap, and settled down to talk. Expression heavy as a boulder, Buzz became angrier and angrier as Joan tried to convince him that their lives would “eventually return to normal.”

“Joan, I’ve been to the Moon, and I’m never going to be allowed to live the way I once lived. Neither are you and neither are our kids. Your belief isn’t right, it’s only a hope and it won’t work. Let’s try to make it as worthwhile as we can.”

He told her that all three of the astronauts and their wives were “fakes and fools for allowing ourselves to be convinced by some strange concept of duty to be sent through all of these countries for the sake of propaganda, nothing more, nothing less.” It was an interplanetary dog and pony show.

He called Joan a fake, too. They got drunker and drunker until they eventually fell asleep.

Two days later in London, the astronauts presented a genuine Moon rock to Queen Elizabeth. Rome was next. At the Vatican, the wives wore black lace mantillas for a private audience with the pope. The couples sat on thrones under a Renaissance ceiling painted with angels and clouds. After receiving his blessings, Buzz wanted to head immediately back to the hotel. That night was the big party at Gina Lollobrigida’s.

Before they left, much to her chagrin, Joan got hit with a bad case of stomach flu. She spent her time in the bathroom while Buzz went to Gina’s. Buzz didn’t waltz in until dawn. He had spent the night as part of the international jet set. He may have felt he’d been in a scene right out of Fellini’s
La Dolce Vita
. But it was clear that he was now in the doghouse.

16

Everywoman

P
ractically everyone Jane Conrad had ever known was at the Houston socialite’s party at the Eau Gallie Yacht Club near Cape Kennedy on the eve of Pete’s Apollo 12 Moon launch. It was an elegant evening, but Jane couldn’t shake the feeling that it was all a dream. Familiar faces from all the way back to St. Mary’s Hall, the boarding school she’d attended in San Antonio before Bryn Mawr, mixed with those she’d previously seen only in movies and on television: Jimmy Stewart and African American country singer Charley Pride, whose music Pete was taking with him to listen to on the way to the Moon. Pete’s old space twin, Gordo Cooper, was chatting up some French starlet, Yvette Mimieux, and the Astronaut Office’s giant stuffed ape mascot wore a tux for photo ops. It all seemed surreal to Jane.

Jane’s hair was cut into a short geometric Vidal Sassoon bob, and she wore a candy-colored jersey minidress with kaleidoscopic swirls of deep purple, green, and bright sky blue that had been specially designed for her by Emilio Pucci. It had been a surprise personal gift from “The Marquis,” with one stipulation. She had to wear it during the Apollo 12 launch festivities for good luck (and free advertising).

At one point Jane was called to the phone. She clacked across the dance floor in strappy black heels. “Dearie,” as she called Pete, was quarantined over in the astronaut quarters at the Cape. “I love you,” said Jane. Pete found it difficult even to say “I love you” back. All he ever said when Jane told him how much she loved him was a swift “Love you more.” Whispering her good-byes, without ever saying the actual word “good-bye,” as per the Astrowife tradition, Jane handed the receiver to her four ash-blond boys. They took turns talking to their dad.

In the weeks prior to his flight, Pete had practically disappeared from Jane’s life, floating farther and farther away from her as if he were already in space. He’d done the same before Gemini 7, but then he’d snapped back upon his return to Earth. She wasn’t quite as delicate with him this time around. One weekend when he was home, he sat in the living room on the sofa, upholstered in bird print, flipping through his latest issue of
Aviation Week
.

“When you come back next time,” interrupted Jane, “why don’t you take a room at the Kings Inn, so I won’t be tempted to bother you? I bet you don’t even know you are home, do you?”

She knew he was busy training, but the old Astrowife routine of getting up at five in the morning to cook him steak and eggs seemed so
dated
. Jane felt a change coming over her, too, as Pete was getting closer to going into space. Her own “personal countdown” was how she phrased it to friends.

After liftoff on November 19, 1969, Jane returned to Houston to ride out the ten-day mission. As one reporter noted, there were “no tears, no handwringing, no high drama” for Apollo 12 wives Jane, Sue Bean, and Fourteen wife Barbara Gordon. Barbara was affectionately known in the neighborhood as “the zookeeper” for wrangling her six rambunctious kids as well as a menagerie of pets, including a baby boa constrictor. If a neighbor was about to raise their shovel and murder a big ole poisonous viper, they’d better think twice because it might be “one of the Gordons’ children’s pets.”

Apollo 11 had gotten all the festive rejoicing because it was the first Moon landing. Since Apollo 12 was a repeat, with the exception of landing on the so-called “Snowman” crater in the Ocean of Storms rather than the Sea of Tranquility, everyone expected a calmer reception. What had been accomplished once could be accomplished again. The press dubbed playboy Pete, Alan “Beano,” and Dick Gordon (known among the astronauts as “the Animal”) “the go-go crew,” because unlike taciturn Neil, Buzz, and Mike, this crew was intent on having a ball. The three had gotten matching gold Corvettes from Jim Rathmann, and drove them around the Cape wearing gold aviators and their powder-blue NASA flight suits.