by Andrew Smith
It’s mostly children who worry about toilet procedures in flight, but not exclusively so. According to the Lindbergh biographer A. Scott Berg, the first question King George V asked after that solo transatlantic flight in 1927 was “How did you pee?” (The answer involved sympathy for the Frenchmen who’d hoisted him onto their shoulders after thirty-three hours in the air.) Naturally, the astronauts had more sophisticated systems – we know that they made use of condoms which channelled their urine into receptacles on the early flights. The trouble was that if anything leaked, you ended up with little bobbling globules of piss reeking around your ears. This happened to Gordon Cooper on his Mercury flight and all he could do was herd them together every so often, so that he knew where they were. The rubbers on Apollo had the same problems, but were connected through a hose and valve directly to space. Not only was it easy to catch yourself in the mechanism, but opening the valve brought the hungry tug of absolute vacuum and at this point, you understood that you were connected directly to the void, uniquely, as no human had ever been before, via your penis. This thought alone was enough to shrivel the steeliest resolve, leading to leakage and yet more piss reeking around the cabin, an additional hazard for which your fellow space lords would not thank you. There were compensations, mind: one of the best Gemini stories concerns Wally Schirra’s beautiful photo of a “urine dump” at dawn, where the liquid ejected from the craft instantly atomizes and crystallizes, simulating a firework display in the sunlight.
Legend holds that a NASA astronomer found it among pictures of stars.
“Wally, what constellation is this?” he asked excitedly.
“Jocelyn,” came the deadpan reply, “that’s the constellation Urion.”
But that was all pissing in the wind. Defecation was the real deal. To do this on Apollo, you had to climb to the lower right side of the craft while your crewmates moved as far away from you as they possibly could – which anyone who’s seen one of the capsules will appreciate wasn’t far. There, you got completely naked, removing rings, watches, everything, because you couldn’t be sure what was going to happen next; then you positioned a special plastic bag as best you could, and went, hoping that everything went in it. Remember that you’re floating; the bag is floating; your shit is floating. Charlie says: “Anything you can imagine happening … happened.” Thus there is the tale of a stool that went freelance on one flight, causing a panic that must have been something like the famous scene from Caddyshack where someone accidentally drops a chocolate bar in a holiday camp swimming pool. So unspeakable was the hour-long process of dumping and getting cleaned up afterwards that I heard rumours of one astronaut dosing himself with Imodium, which enabled him to hold it in for eight whole days. I’d rather suspected this to have been Alan (“anal” spelled sideways) Bean, but gossip finally suggested another candidate.
Anders was standing in line at an airport check-in desk when I called him on his mobile phone. He came clean straightaway.
“Haha – yeah,” he hollered above the background noise. “I set the world’s longest distance no-bowel-movement record … three-quarters of a million miles! Everything was looking a little brownish to me when I got home … ”
He went on to point out that you can verify this by watching the way he waddles across the carrier deck in the post-splashdown footage. Later, I notice the curious fact that when his crew addressed Congress shortly afterwards, he was the only person in the building wearing a brown suit, leading me to wonder whether his space “brown-out” left a permanent mark on his psyche. As Charlie says: “We had a lot of laughs with the old waste-management system.” None of which lets NASA off the hook about mixing genders on Apollo, because they could have sent an all-woman crew, but this was the 1960s: the times, they weren’t a-changing. There weren’t many girls in rock groups, either.
The obvious irony of this is that the Moon has tended to be identified with women down the ages, perhaps because her twenty-nine-and-a-half-day cycle roughly corresponds to a regular menstrual cycle. No one knows why this is: Darwin thought it might stem from our oceanic origins, from the fact that the highest tides occur at full and new Moons, making these the best time for reproduction. Either way, the word for “Moon” and “menstruation” is related or interchangeable in many languages and it’s easy to see why some women might have felt unease at her symbolic assault by men (and precisely as feminism prepared to enter its most militant and influential phase). The colourful TV astrologer Sybil Leak, for instance, sided with Tom Stoppard in complaining of science “ripping the veil of mystique from the Moon” when Apollo went up; of her dignity being stripped away by Buzz and his pals tromping over her in their size thirteen boots. Polls consistently showed the space programme of the Sixties and Seventies to have far more support among men than among women.
Compensation comes from hoping that somewhere there is a parallel universe in which Rene Carpenter, the first of Mercury-flier Scott Carpenter’s four wives, was the first Moonwalker. It’s reputed that in 1966 Neil Simon based an entire play – the romantic/political comedy Star Spangled Girl – on a lively exchange he witnessed between her and the New York Post columnist Paddy Chayefsky at a party in his house. She was bright and magnetic then, and it’s clear that not much has changed when I catch up with her in Denver, where she treats me to a characteristically burlesque account of the early days of the programme: of the women’s excitement at having a semipermanent place to live for the first time; of arriving in south Texas to find a nowhere of sagebrush and swamp, with no stores or supermarkets (or to begin with even houses) within an hour’s drive; of supervising the building of their first homes having never owned property before and winding up with floods whenever it rained, or air-conditioning systems connected to fireplace chimneys, so that the units billowed smoke whenever a fire was lit; of the men soon spending all their time at the Cape, preparing in all probability to be blown to smithereens while NASA ran flight tests, including one with Ham the chimpanzee (who lucked out and returned safely). Rene remembers that part well.
“You know, I was on the beach with Jo Schirra for the last Atlas test firing,” she says, “and it blew up right in front of us! It was terrifying, but there was fatalism among the wives, a lot of gallows humour. You’d say ‘Oh, thank God the monkey wasn’t in that one.’”
Carpenter speaks of the way their lives changed in Houston, how they suddenly had people camping outside their doors and tour buses turning up, and how they trained local kids to misdirect the gawpers somewhere else. Uniquely, she wrote her own stories for Life, which would then be edited by the reporter Loudon Wainwright – father of singer-songwriter Loudon III and grandfather of Rufus – whom she adored, sighing:
“Oh, he was a doll-baby, so sensitive … always crying. Life was the one thing I trusted, because you couldn’t trust NASA.”
When Scott flew his one mission, she had to sneak herself and the children to a safe house at the Cape, telling the kids to keep their heads down in the back of the car as she passed the TV scouts posted at every junction to intercept her, because the wives’ reaction was part of the story they wanted. Had they found her, they’d have asked the same coded questions, before the flight, about impending widowhood and afterwards expected the same response to the avoidance of widowhood, which usually boiled down to “I’m proud, thrilled, happy.” Later, when Apollo 12 splashed down, Sue Bean, Barbara Gordon and Jane Conrad mocked this ritual by appearing in identical dresses with bouffants you could hide a Saturn in, holding aloft three cards with these very words scrawled on them, but the little-lady act was a joke among the women long before that. One wife who was asked by a female reporter how she felt when her husband was up is said to have blinked and answered, “Honey, how do you feel when your husband is up?” at which the interview time was judged to be up. In The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe recounts a skit Rene used to do with the other wives, in which she played the TV correspondent Nancy Whoever, interviewing Primly Stable, wife of the famous astrona
ut Squarely Stable, on the front lawn of her “trim, modest, suburban home.” It would end with Nancy observing that, obviously, with her man safely home, Primly’s greatest prayer had already been answered, but wondering what her one other wish might be, to which Primly would reply, “Well, Nancy, I’d wish for an Electrolux vacuum cleaner with all the attachments …”
Some women struggled with the glare, but Rene loved it, loved the media work, the political engagement, visits to the White House and getting to know Jackie Kennedy well (“she was so warm, had such charisma”) and the bond formed with the other women – “all my sisters” – to whom she still feels close. “We were dead certain that we had to remain close,” she says. “We had to be above the competition that was going on among the men.”
Even so, life was different for the space sisters as the 1950s turned into the Sixties. Their social lives were still confined, with days organized around teas, and certain clothes to be worn at certain times of the day. Twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, they had to call at the house of superior officers’ wives and leave little embossed cards in accordance with some nonsensical military tradition. Yet this maniacal attention to propriety wasn’t confined to the forces: women’s magazines were full of articles on whether toilet rolls should be placed on the holders with the trailing end in or out, and on the correct way to pour and receive a cup of tea (“You remove your right glove and place it in your handbag so that the fingers just flop over the edge, then proceed …”). Still, it was a picnic next to Navy deployment. I ask whether she blames the programme for her split with Scott in 1967.
“No, no – it probably made it last longer,” she laughs. “You know, divorce was considered a terrible thing then. But over the course of the Sixties, all the veneer seemed to fall away from everything.”
After the breakup, Rene campaigned for Bobby Kennedy in the presidential primaries, until he was assassinated. She claims to have been with him when news came of Martin Luther King’s murder a few months before, and in common with most of Bobby’s heartbroken supporters, she stayed away from that year’s notorious Democratic Convention in Chicago.
“I don’t know whether Bobby would have made a good president or not,” she muses when I ask whether he might have done a better job than JFK. “It was very difficult for him because he was so shy – not like JFK, who was going to be a journalist and was surrounded by journalist pals and speechwriters … and Bobby could hold a grudge, but at the time he was more dedicated to civil rights than JFK was: he had a lot of black friends and was braver.”
Post-Bobby, she forged her own career in TV while raising the four children she’d had with Scott. She remarried in 1977. Asked whether it had been a wrench to leave NASA, she almost falls out of her chair, exclaiming. “Oh God, no! I could hardly wait to leave NASA!” Nevertheless, she says, they were wonderful times.
But not always. Valerie Anders has fond memories, too, but draws an exhausting picture of lugging babies around while she readied the elder of her five kids for school, sorted out and cleaned the house, mowed lawns and tended gardens, drove miles to get shopping and tried to look glamorous enough to represent the programme at functions in her husband’s absence, when they couldn’t afford babysitters and she had only one smart dress (the green one you’ll find her wearing in all of the post–Apollo 8 proud-thrilled-happy pictures).
“It was very difficult,” she states finally. “Everybody tried to make a joke out of all the difficulties that we had. We just thought that was the way life was. Then again, when these flights came up that were so risky, we also knew that if we weren’t there, we would have been on a base and our husbands would have been flying in Vietnam.”
Strangely, that hadn’t occurred to me.
“Oh, absolutely. All our friends were there. And I felt that it was an exciting adventure that humanity had embarked on – for whatever reason, whether it was about beating the Russians or not. At least this was something that stretched us, instead of miring us in the mud of Vietnam. At least there was a fifty-fifty chance he’d come back from this one.”
Jan Evans, de facto coordinator of biannual Original Wives gatherings, describes the hate mail and calls she received when her late husband Ron, CM pilot on Apollo 17, was flying in Vietnam prior to NASA. After that, the Apollo years seemed wonderful to her. She laughs with the revelation that she volunteered her husband for the Astronaut Corps while he was away, but not as she recalls the time word came of another marriage breaking up and Ron, genuinely upset, slammed his fist on the table and said, “Damn it, don’t any of these couples ever talk to each other?!”
Val Anders had particular reason to linger on the danger of Apollo 8, which carried the first human beings around the Moon, because there was a feeling that it had been rushed following intelligence reports that the Soviets were preparing their own circumlunar flight. NASA administrator James Webb’s response to the suggestion that the first crewed Saturn V flight should leave Earth orbit is reported to have been “Are you out of your mind?!” Even the flight directors seemed anxious.
“And I’d never seen them nervous before, which made me nervous. But on the other hand, it was such an exciting step. When you started to think about the possible consequences and what it could mean for the rest of your life, you simply turned off that thought. You couldn’t move beyond what was happening at the moment.”
She stops and sighs. She reminds me that death was a part of the women’s everyday world. When Bill was training in San Francisco, their sister squadron went through a bad patch, where they were losing about one pilot a week, “and you’d see the little black car coming to the housing area, wondering where it would stop. We all went through that.” So while they might not have talked about the fear, they felt it. A week after the Apollo 11 crew was announced, Joan Aldrin wrote in her diary: “Broke out in blotches last night, which still persist today. I’m covered in pancake makeup and jumpy. Nerves. If I’m like this now, what will I be like when it really happens?”
I ask about the children and Valerie Anders says that her eldest son, who was eleven when Bill flew, was notably excited by what was happening. He was protected from any negative consequences by the fact that most of his friends had parents in the programme. Like everyone else, she didn’t understand what a blessing this was until afterwards.
“When we moved to Washington, D.C., I think it was very hard on our second son, who wanted to be part of the crowd in sixth grade, but then stood out because his father had done this. Only then did he begin to realize that it was quite extraordinary, and he didn’t deal with that well. I don’t think the girls had as hard a time as the boys. My personal feeling is that the sons were trying to live up to what their dads did, whereas the daughters could go a different direction and feel no need to compare themselves.”
Valerie sighs again, more deeply this time. It is an awesome thing to feel a need to live up to. Another of the women told me:
“There have been quite a few cases of problems with the sons, ’cos they just couldn’t compete with the legend. Michael Collins lost his only son. That was just …”
Then she trailed off. Rene Carpenter told me that her eldest son developed schizophrenia in his late teens. I remember Collins writing about his six-year-old boy, the youngest of his three children, being interviewed on TV.
“‘What do you think,’ Michael is asked, ‘about your father going down in history?’ ‘Fine,’ says Michael; and after a considerable pause, ‘What is history, anyway?’ ”
In retrospect, that question might be read many different ways. Apollo was an awe-inspiring enterprise, but it came with a high price tag in more ways than one.
The living room of the Duke residence is plush, but not ostentatious, with a central well approached by stone steps and containing a modern, beige sofa suite and glass-topped coffee table, and with beautiful views over the park through sliding glass doors at the back. It’s a cool, deceptively masculine room, decorated with ethnic souvenirs and phot
os of grandchildren and their two sons in stripy Seventies flares, but afterwards I can’t recall seeing any evidence of Charlie’s astronaut career. He emerged from the fug of the 1970s calling his Moonshot “the dust of my life,” and I’m wondering whether he still feels that way as he waits for me to settle in an armchair before draping himself over the end of the sofa opposite. Dotty brings coffee, then perches next to him, leaning forward with her arms on her knees. She’s in a neat black skirt and white blouse. He’s chiselled Clint Eastwood handsome in jeans and unbuttoned blue cardigan over a casual white-striped shirt. They both look slim and fit and healthy and Charlie would probably beat me in a race to the mailbox and back. NASA knew how to pick ’em.
Born in October 1935, Duke is the youngest of the Moonwalkers and was recruited in 1966 as part of the nineteen-strong fifth group of astronauts. For all his modesty, he must have impressed the power brokers to get anywhere near a flight, and in fact wouldn’t have flown but for Gene Cernan’s astonishing decision to turn down the Apollo 16 LM pilot’s job in favour of commanding 17 – an act of will made possible only by his throttle jockey rapport with Deke Slayton. Duke’s parents were South Carolinians who met in New York, where they’d gone looking for work during the Great Depression. When a child loomed, they returned south, and in October 1935 took delivery of identical twins, Charles and Bill, but after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor drew America into World War II on December 7, 1941, Duke Senior volunteered for the Navy and was sent to the South Pacific. This was classic Greatest Generation stuff and Charlie did everything in his boyish power to help the effort, collecting aluminum foil and raising money in his spare time. His heroes were the cowboys and pilots he saw at the Saturday matinees. By the time the war ended, he knew he wanted to go into the military.