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

by Neal Thompson

  One victim of such steam letting was Stanley White, an Air Force doctor who had helped NASA select the astronauts and worked with them at Langley. White was part of the astronauts’ medical team. A jovial, balding man with a proud streak of practicality, he had just purchased one of the bulbous new Volkswagen Beetles and bragged annoyingly to the astronauts about its performance and incredible gas mileage. The astronauts, led by Wally Schirra, also a car enthusiast (and the lead practical joker of the group), decided to humble the man. He and Shepard began adding a quart of gas to White’s Volkswagen every other day, and White began to rave that his gas mileage was even better than he thought. Then Schirra and Shepard began siphoning off a quart here and there, and loved it as White came into the office bewildered and, day by day, “went berserk.” Such “gotchas” would become one of the favorite pastimes of the Mercury Seven, and they would occur more frequently when a man named Shorty entered their lives.

  Five-foot-six-inch John A. “Shorty” Powers was a brusque Air Force colonel who took over as NASA’s chief of public information. Shorty had been a combat pilot in World War II and Korea before switching to public information jobs with the Air Force. He had an impish grin and a deep, honeyed voice that be-lied his small physical stature. When he joined the astronauts at their headquarters at Langley, right from the start he felt as if he was a “whippersnapper” whom none of them “respected.” “They were leery of me and I was scared to death of them,” Shorty admitted a decade later. “I had been a military combat aviator for years, had been to Edwards [Air Force Base], had seen flight tests. But these guys just plain scared me.”

  The military world exists in a different dimension from the rest of the world. It has its own cities, its own social strata, its own system of governance and law, its own language. A military man could spend his entire career inside that dimension, never crossing over to the “real” world of everyday American life. Shorty Powers controlled the portal between the military world to which the Mercury Seven had become accustomed and the real world, which was now demanding more information about and access to the new astro-heroes. Shorty’s job was to train the astronauts to be media darlings. Except for John Glenn, they didn’t like it one bit. And they let Shorty know it.

  At the time, the astronauts were slowly beginning to get comfortable with Life magazine’s reporters and photographers, who were given unfettered access to them. Even Deke Slayton, the most rabid press-hater behind Shepard, came to regard some of Life’s men as allies rather than adversaries. But Shorty was no ally. “A real pain in the ass,” Slayton called him, and complained often of how Shorty pestered the astronauts way too often with “the freedom of the press thing.”

  Shorty’s problem was that he had to answer all the questions from the other reporters—those who didn’t have Life’s exclusive access. To calm them, he tried to set the astronauts up at staged events and occasional press conferences. That made some of the press happy but earned Shorty complaints from NASA and the astronauts that he was exploiting the Mercury Seven. “I think all seven guys really enjoyed the exposure—they are human and they don’t mind seeing their names in the papers,” Shorty once said. “Yet, as test pilots, they instinctively rebelled at having to spend time with the news media.” That continuous problem of being the man in the middle would literally drive Shorty to drink. A lot. And drink would one day cost him his job and, eventually, his life.

  In an effort to smooth the feathers that his press policies had ruffled, Shorty one day gathered the seven in a room at Langley and tried to explain that many reporters continued to accuse him, and the astronauts, of giving the Life people special access. A couple of the astronauts said they’d heard such flak at their press conferences, but it wasn’t their job to make any of them happy. That was Shorty’s job. A compromise was offered: What if they made it harder for the Life guys to keep up with the astronauts? Shorty liked the idea and agreed “we would play games with Don Schanche [a Life reporter and writer] and Ralph Morse [the lead photographer].”

  None of them anticipated the ingenuity of Life’s combative, tough-talking, war-hardened shooter, Ralph Morse.

  The astronauts were scheduled to begin a weeklong desert survival training class in Nevada—an exercise designed to prepare them to live in the desert if their capsule accidentally landed far off course instead of parachuting to a landing at sea. They decided not to tell Morse or Schanche anything, but Morse—not above using juveniles as sources—got to chatting one day with Scott Carpenter’s five-year-old son and managed to get the kid to tell him where his astronaut dad was headed. “Daddy is going to Reno,” the boy said, and when the astronauts arrived at their Reno hotel, Morse and Schanche were in the hotel lobby waiting for them.

  Still, since the training would be run by the U.S. Air Force Survival School, based at nearby Stead Air Force Base, the astronauts figured they could lose the Life duo the next day in the off-limits scrub brush of the sprawling air base’s inhospitable landscape, full of scorpions, rattlesnakes, and oppressive heat. When Morse urged Shorty to let him tag along, Shorty told him that the training was off-limits. “That’s a lot of horseshit,” Morse argued in his nasal Brooklyn accent. “The desert isn’t owned by the government, it’s owned by the people.”

  A short, scrappy, funny New Yorker, Morse had been a combat photographer in World War II. He had scrambled ashore with the Marines at the bloody Battle of Guadalcanal, joined soldiers storming the death-covered beaches at Normandy, and ridden into Paris beside Patton, snapping photos of the conquering general. When he wasn’t chasing war, Morse was snapping photographs of Jackie Robinson stealing home and Ernest Hemingway getting drunk in Paris. He was a resourceful, fearless photographer and the astronauts, despite their decision to elude him, genuinely liked Morse. They’d admired him even more once they saw how tough the man was to shake.

  Morse’s assignment from Life was to “cover space.” Since no one was anywhere near space yet, he decided early on that the best way to illustrate the space program with photographs was to shadow the astronauts and see what happened.

  Morse learned that the astronauts’ desert survival training would be conducted near a base camp of large red-and-white tents. From there, the astronauts were supposed to venture out into the 120-degree heat of the Nevada desert and survive on their own for three days, scrounging up plants to eat and digging to find their own water.

  After a morning classroom briefing, the astronauts bumped into Morse and Schanche at their Reno hotel and invited them to go fishing that afternoon, but Morse declined. “I’ve got to find out where you guys are going tomorrow,” Morse said.

  Two hours later, Morse and Schanche were flying above the desert in a rented airplane with a dozen one-pound bags of flour at their feet. Morse had learned that the camp was forty to fifty miles southeast of Reno—not at the Air Force base but on public land. He had the pilot fly to a spot near where he suspected the base camp to be, and then fly expanding circles until they found the red-and-white tents. Once he located the camp, Morse told the pilot to fly low and straight until they reached a road. He then opened up a side window and began dropping a bag of flour every few seconds. Poof . . . poof . . . poof . . . the bags landed in smoky white eruptions, until the plane reached a dirt road. Poof . . . poof . . . Morse dropped a couple of bags on the road, then had the pilot fly to the nearest paved road. Poof . . . poof . . . And so on to an intersection near the airport.

  Morse and Schanche then tried to rent a car, but the owner of the small car rental office didn’t have anything left to give them. When they explained they were with Life magazine, the proprietor offered to loan them an old Jeep he had on the lot. Early the next morning Morse and Schanche drove to the intersection by the airport and then followed their pattern of flour bombs toward the training site. They were thankful for the Jeep, which carried them over the dwarf cactus, the tangles of sagebrush, and the sand and right up to the tents of the base camp.

  When the astronauts a
nd Shorty arrived by helicopter, Morse and Schanche were waiting beside the red-and-white tents. Morse was wearing a white apron and holding an insulated pot of coffee that he’d borrowed from the hotel. “Okay, guys,” he said. “How ’bout a cuppa coffee?”

  Shorty was “furious,” Morse recalled, but the astronauts had a big laugh. Shorty allowed Morse and Schanche to stay if they promised to get their photographs and interviews quickly and then leave at day’s end. But the astronauts weren’t about to let Morse get away with such an impressive gotcha.

  While Morse was running around taking pictures, Shepard and Schirra rigged one of their smoke flares to his Jeep. They tied a piece of string to a blade on the cooling fan and the other end of the string to the activator cap on the flare. Then Shepard called to him, “Ralph, your Jeep is in the way, you better move it.” Morse hit the starter and—bam!— was immediately engulfed in a cloud of thick orange smoke, which poured through the vents and into the Jeep’s passenger compartment. He drove the rough-running Jeep back the next day to the rental office, but it was closed and he had no choice but to leave the damaged car there and catch a ride back to the airport. For some reason, he says, “I never did get a bill.”

  For the next three days, the astronauts lolled around during the day amid the sagebrush and cactus and then foraged for food (bugs, the hearts of palm trees) and water (inside cactus) at night, just as they’d been taught in the classroom. They cut up white parachutes to construct tents, makeshift shoes, capes, and hats as protection against the hot desert sun. But mainly they hid beneath their parachutes to escape heat that hovered around 110 degrees and occasionally boiled up to 145.

  John Glenn tried an ill-advised experiment to see how long he could go without water. He lasted twenty-four hours, and a doctor found him at the end of the three days lying in a patch of sagebrush, dehydrated and nearly unconscious. “As debilitated as I have ever been,” said Glenn, who then drank fifteen pints of water “without passing a drop.”

  One photograph of the training session shows Shepard standing in long underwear, his unshaven chin stuck out, with a sheet of parachute cloth twirled into a turban on his head. The other six are standing grimly on either side of him looking like malnourished refugees. Glenn is the only one with a trace of a smile.

  11

  “A harlot of a town”

  My name ees José Jiménez.”

  Every time he heard those words, spoken languidly by a short man in a shiny spacesuit, Shepard busted out laughing. Soon the rest of the nation was laughing, too.

  Shepard first heard José’s voice when a record album arrived in the mail with a picture of a bug-eyed spaceman on the cover accompanying words that Shepard imagined someday describing himself: “José Jiménez, the astronaut, the first man in space.” The record’s producer, Mickey Kapp, sent eight copies of the album (one for each astronaut and one for Shorty Powers, who liked to call himself the eighth astronaut) to the astronauts’ office at Langley. Kapp never heard back from anyone and assumed his deed had gone unnoticed, the albums landing in the trash with other trinkets from fans.

  Not until months later would he learn that the astronauts— especially Shepard—absolutely loved the record and listened to it in the office after intense training sessions. Shepard even tape-recorded the album and, during lulls between simulation training exercises or during test launches at the Cape, would play the tapes at full volume over the Mission Control loudspeakers. Some of the engineers hated the irreverent use of their sound system, but they were powerless to overrule an astronaut.

  Shepard’s reaction to José could have gone either way. He might have seen it as an insult and gotten pissed off. Instead, he felt that the quivering little Mexican—“Plees, don’t let them send me up”—captured exactly what the astronauts sometimes felt.

  With all the playing hard and training hard, their lives seemed to exist in a world apart. Shepard and the other six had no idea what movies were popular or what books were best-sellers, and felt very disconnected from the reality of American life. But José brought with him a dose of that other world. “Sometimes we like to have a little fun, too,” Shepard once told an interviewer. “It releases the tension.”

  The album had been recorded at a comedy club in San Francisco. José was the offspring of Bill Dana, a comedy writer on the Steve Allen Show who did a routine in 1959 about a Latino Santa Claus (“jo, jo, jo”). After Santa Claus, José became a piano tuner, a rancher, a bobsled racer, a Navy submariner, a lion tamer, a U.S. senator, and a surfer who called himself the “king of the surf.” Asked by his straight man how he became king of the surf, José replied, “I had cards printed.”

  Playwright Neil Simon, Dana’s friend since the early 1950s, one day asked if José had ever been an astronaut. A short time later, in early 1960, Dana unveiled José the reluctant astronaut on Gary Moore’s TV show. The routine was an immediate smash hit and a turning point in Dana’s career. It would lead to a lifelong friendship with the astronauts, especially Shepard, and would ultimately—through album sales and television appearances—make Dana a very wealthy man.

  The friendship began one night at the Kings Inn, a nightclub in Cocoa Beach, the town just south of Cape Canaveral, where Dana became José before a raucously appreciative crowd of NASA employees. Dana usually performed with a straight man who’d ask such lines as, “Is that your crash helmet?” And José would respond, in a slightly effeminate Hispanic dialect, “Oh, I hope not.”

  That night at the Kings Inn, Dana performed without his straight man. But a few minutes into the routine, a guy in the front row began yelling out the straight man’s lines.

  “Has NASA provided something to break your fall?” the man yelled.

  “Oh, jess,” Dana/José replied. “The state of Nebada.”

  The amateur straight man was Shepard, who was sitting with Wally Schirra and Deke Slayton. Dana invited Shepard up onstage and was impressed and flattered that he knew all the lines.

  “Mr. Jiménez,” Shepard said, “would you tell us a little about your space suit?”

  “Yeah, it’s very uncomfortable.”

  “And what’s that, your crash helmet?”

  “Oh, I hope not.”

  Shepard wasn’t very good at playing the straight man. He kept laughing, so Schirra came up onstage to take over for a few lines. And then Slayton. The club was roaring as the three astronauts took turns. After the show, Dana hurried to a phone to call his producer in New York. “Mickey, you’ve got to come down here,” Dana practically yelled into the receiver. “They know us. They know every word. And they love us.”

  Dana—his real name was Szathmary—was of Hungarian and Jewish descent, from Quincy, Massachusetts. As an infantry-man in World War II, he had earned a Bronze Star for bravery, a fact that further endeared him to Shepard and the others. Shepard took to calling him Szathmary, and Schirra called him their “Jungarian Hew” (“Hungarian Jew” in José-speak).

  Dana’s routine would eventually anger some Hispanic groups who felt the civil rights era was the wrong moment in time for a hapless, milquetoast Hispanic. Under pressure from such complaints, he would one day be forced to retire José. But that was years ahead. In 1960 José the astronaut was the perfect mascot for a group of tightly wound test pilots in need of an occasional dose of escapism.

  Growing tensions between the press and the astronauts were occasionally reflected in the coverage they received in other publications (Life was always laudatory and respectful). One of the papers sought out Chuck Yeager to ask his opinion about the astronaut program. Would he have been interested in joining them? the reporter asked. “No,” the gruff aviator said. “It doesn’t really require a pilot. And besides,” Yeager added, referring to the primates used in test launches, “you’d have to sweep the monkey shit off the seat before you could sit down.”

  Such comments, from Yeager and other of the astronauts’ snide, jet-flying peers, led to occasional quips that the astronauts were nothing more than
NASA’s guinea pigs, just “Spam in a can.” Spam was the molded block of ground-up mystery meat that was a staple of the military man’s diet; John Glenn once ate Spam daily for two months during World War II. Comments coming so publicly and from within their own fraternity stung the astronauts. They knew some of their peers were, as Glenn put it, “a little envious,” and envy was a common and accepted emotion in the military world.

  Still, petty put-downs served as harsh reminders to Shepard and his new colleagues that they were no longer military men, no longer test pilots. And they were astronauts in name only, not in deed. Not yet. Those criticisms also reflected a larger debate within the military about this new and costly emphasis on space travel.

  What bothered Shepard and the others even more than the predictable professional jealousies was this thought: Maybe they’re right. At the time, the astronauts were still struggling to establish their voice in the ongoing design of the capsule they would one day fly.

  Shepard occasionally tried to defuse the derisions with a joke about how he was picked to become an astronaut. “They ran out of monkeys,” he’d say. But deep down, despite the instant fame, Shepard had to occasionally wonder whether his father had been right. Had he traded an admiral-track career for Spam?

  Shorty Powers once arranged to have the seven travel to Los Angeles for a goodwill tour at a few companies in southern California’s burgeoning aerospace industry, which at the time was building various pieces of NASA’s rocketry. Also, the timing of the West Coast tour coincided with the annual convention of the astronauts’ peers, the exclusive Society of Experimental Test Pilots. Maybe, thought Shorty, an appearance there would defuse some of the Spam bullshit.