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

by Neal Thompson

  In 1957, after working at various Florida hotels over the previous decade, Landwirth was hired to manage the Starlight Motel, which for years was the lone motel on Cocoa Beach. The Starlight, with its fountain of a urinating boy out front—a replica of a famous statue in Brussels—was the social center of Cocoa Beach in the late 1950s. It had a bakery and coffee shop. And when the astronauts came to town, their favorite place for a bourbon was the motel’s surreal, space-themed Starlight Lounge, with black lights that illuminated spooky scenes of lunar craters and space capsules painted on the walls.

  Landwirth had turned the motel and lounge into a hugely successful enterprise. His method was to treat customers, especially the astronauts, as family. He also hired the most beautiful waitresses and barmaids he could find, threw parties and baked huge cakes for the astronauts, and sent booze and food to the reporters covering missile launches. When the motel became so popular that its ninety-nine rooms were always booked, he began booking two people to a room and earned the nickname “Double-up Henri.”

  The astronauts worked hard to outsmart Landwirth, concocting various schemes to get a room without a roommate: My wife is coming tomorrow, Henri, I swear. But the astronauts were drawn to Landwirth, with his European sophistication, his sad eyes, and his nice suits.

  A person had to have some exceptional quality to impress the astronauts—especially Shepard, who didn’t place much value on the ordinary. What Shepard and the others all quietly admired in Landwirth was his survivorship, his stoic strength. When they first met Landwirth, the astronauts would be wearing short-sleeved, polyester Ban Lon shirts while Landwirth always seemed to be wearing long-sleeved shirts. One day Glenn asked about it, and Landwirth rolled up his sleeve to expose a tattoo of faded blue ink on the inside of his left forearm: B4343. It was the number Hitler’s goons had tattooed into his flesh when he first entered their camps as a terrified young teenager.

  Glenn told him, “You should be proud of that. If I had that tattoo, I’d wear it like a dad-gum Congressional Medal of Honor.” And in time Landwirth began to wear short sleeves and to regard B4343 not only as a reminder of the horrors he had witnessed and survived but also as “a personal reminder that I live on borrowed time.”

  Landwirth believed in the heroism and historical value of what his newfound friends had signed on to do. He considered the space program “such an American undertaking that it just pulled you in.” And Landwirth was proud to contribute what he could for the sake of his adopted country. He was “awed” by the astronauts and felt obliged to do any little thing they needed, to be their mother—“to make their lives easier.” Indeed, he would do anything to protect them.

  When the astronauts first began visiting the Cape in 1959 to witness rocket launches, they usually stayed in a building at Cape Canaveral called Hangar S. To Shepard, the three-story, concrete-block building was “austere, nondescript, and totally uncomfortable.” Hangar S was a converted airplane hangar with huge sliding bay doors on either end; its insides had been converted to offices, medical labs, and astronaut bedrooms. To reach their rooms, the astronauts often had to make what Shepard called an “unpleasant walk” through a sheet-metal building beside Hangar S that contained cages full of chimpanzees that were used in some of the test launches. Shepard despised those primates—they reminded him of the Chuck Yeager taunts. Plus the screeching chimps had an annoying habit of playing with their own shit. A congressman once toured the Cape and insisted, despite warnings of their inhospitable behavior, on visiting the chimp cages. The lawmaker stood beside the cage talking baby talk to a chimp he called “little spaceman.” The chimp, Enos, defecated onto his hands and threw a steaming pile of feces onto the congressman’s suit.

  To avoid those foul chimps, the astronauts asked NASA for permission to begin staying down in Cocoa Beach at Landwirth’s Starlight Inn—that is, until new owners took over, removed the peeing-boy fountain and the black lights, and Landwirth quit in disgust. Landwirth was later hired to manage a new Holiday Inn being built on the beach.

  On the day the Holiday Inn opened, the Starlight Lounge coincidentally burst into flames and burned to the ground. The Cocoa Beach police didn’t think the fire was such a coincidence and interrogated Landwirth, who professed shock at the implication. The police found no evidence of anything fishy and later blamed faulty wiring.

  Late one night, Landwirth found Deke Slayton sitting at his new hotel’s Riviera Lounge and asked Slayton if the astronauts would consider moving from the Starlight to his new place. “I don’t see any problem,” Slayton said. “I’ll talk to the boys and let you know.” Slayton called the next day and said they’d accept the offer if they could be guaranteed a room whenever they were in town. Landwirth agreed, and even gave them a ridiculously reduced rate—$8 a night.

  When the astronauts moved to the Holiday Inn, the reporters all followed, and so did the crowds of attractive women who had previously filled the Starlight Lounge. “Wherever the boys were was where everybody else wanted to be,” Landwirth recalled. Soon the Holiday Inn became the place to be in Cocoa Beach.

  But that success also turned Landwirth’s life upside down, adding new duties to his job description. In addition to hotel manager, he became the astronauts’ counselor, protector, and enabler. When an astronaut—alone or with company—wanted privacy, Landwirth gave him privacy. When the reporters got too pesky, he shooed them away. If not for Henri Landwirth, the public might have learned that their heroic, Boy Scout–like astronauts were not as all-American as Life magazine was portraying them.

  “Those first days at the Cape were like a giant fraternity party,” Landwirth recalled—although, even decades later, he would keep the details to himself. Even squeaky-clean John Glenn couldn’t help noticing and being awed by the near bacchanalia of it all: “The food was lavish and the liquor flowed,” he said. “Any one of us who was looking for companionship . . . would not have to look very far.”

  Shepard also considered the escalating party of the Cape to be “like something happening in a movie.” For Shepard, it was the perfect place to be an astro-hero, to drink and relax and be admired and adored. With Landwirth willing to run interference, Shepard could enjoy himself while the press sat obediently at a distance. In time Shepard came to consider Landwirth “a real friend to all of us.”

  But the astronauts didn’t always make Landwirth’s life easier. He was a frenetic, neurotic man, and Shepard and the others loved to rile him. Gordo Cooper once dumped a bucket of live fish into the Holiday Inn’s outdoor pool and sat on the diving board fishing. Landwirth thought it was “the funniest thing I’d ever seen” until the fish began floating to the top, killed by the pool’s chlorine.

  One night Shepard went hunting for alligators at a wealthy friend’s sprawling orange plantation. They wore miners’ helmets with lights on top and roamed through the orange groves looking for the red glint of gator eyes; Shepard’s friend skinned the alligators to make boots of their hide. This night they caught a four-foot gator that Shepard asked to keep as a pet. He brought it back to the Holiday Inn and dumped it in the pool. A few weeks later Shepard and Leo D’Orsey—the Washington, D.C., agent who had brokered the $500,000 Life deal—and a few other astronauts helped a NASA official launch his new boat on the nearby Banana River. But the wind kicked up and the waves got rough— they were spilling their drinks. So they put the boat on a trailer, backed it up to Landwirth’s pool, and dropped it in, kicking off a marathon cocktail party.

  Landwirth occasionally fought back. John Glenn had once staged a mock scene of noisy outrage at the front desk of the Holiday Inn after he found there were no towels in his room. The next time Glenn came to town, he found his room stocked with thousands of towels, so many that he could barely open the door. Landwirth waited around the corner, giggling.

  When the relocation to Cocoa Beach occurred, Shepard and the other astronauts all decided not to move their families down there. There would be too much work and training, they argue
d, and it’d be best for the wives and kids to stay where they were. That, apparently, was fine with Louise, who had settled comfortably in Virginia Beach. She had her church friends and was getting to know some of the other astronauts’ wives who lived up at Langley. Louise told a friend that the astronauts’ wives understood each other “as no one else could.”

  A space writer friend of Shepard’s once wrote of the “paradox” in an astronaut’s relationship with his wife. He might love his wife and his kids, might cherish those weekends at home, smoking a pipe and reading the newspaper in a Barcalounger while the kids played checkers and the wife cooked up a casserole. “But he didn’t want his wife with him when he was at the Cape . . . it just didn’t work,” Martin Caidin, a pilot and space expert, said in his book, The Cape.

  “If she came along to the Cape, the wife became an irritant.” Why? “There was that élan in being an astronaut . . . that brought the females panting and eager to his side,” Caidin said. “They were beautiful people and they knew it.” Astronauts—even those who were happily married—didn’t want “wives all over the damn place.” Wives and Cocoa Beach were not a good mix. Too risky. “So, if the astronaut’s wife were smart, she stayed at home when he went to the Cape,” Caidin said. “The only wise thing to do was to arrive just before the launch.”

  That’s exactly what Louise learned to do, she once said, “rather than stand around and throw in a lot of emotion and make his job harder for him.” “I decided long ago during his Navy career that it is not good to stand around and complicate things for him when he has a job to do,” she said in a Life article.

  Just like her dapper husband, Louise was always dressed perfectly, her hair just right, her demeanor suited to each situation—perfectly assembled. And as she approached forty she was as beautiful as ever. Yet while her sincere smile could make strangers feel instantly welcome in her presence at parties and in public, Louise never mingled easily with the other astronauts’ wives. She simply wasn’t one of the “gals,” wearing cut-off shorts and flip-flops for an afternoon of drinking martinis and smoking in the backyard. She preferred needlepoint and games of solitaire. She chose new friends carefully and infrequently.

  When Navy wives get together as a group, each tends to assume within that group a position roughly equal to her husband’s rank, so that an admiral’s wife would figuratively lord it above a group of commanders’ wives. Shepard’s rank at the time—lieutenant commander—was essentially the same as the other six astronauts, but he sometimes acted as if he outranked them. And Louise, in turn, often stood out as the classiest, most sophisticated in a room of astronaut wives.

  But what dwelled behind that beatific façade? many acquaintances wondered. Like Alan, Louise maintained an emotional barrier beyond which few people were allowed. Louise’s constant smile, her optimistic demeanor and heavy reliance on her church seemed to be covering up some deeper unease. Some friends said it was the media glare that rankled Louise. But other friends knew it wasn’t just the media.

  Louise saw little of her husband during 1959 and 1960. He’d be gone for weeks at a time—St. Louis, Pensacola, Los Angeles, the Cape—while she stayed home at Virginia Beach with the two younger girls, Julie and Alice. (Laura, the eldest, was sent to Louise’s alma mater, Principia.) One summer weekend Alan returned home for a short break, but instead of a quiet night at home, they attended a Navy friend’s party, where Alan stunned the guests by water-skiing barefoot, a trick he’d worked hard to perfect. He ended the night by drag-racing in the new Corvette he had purchased, beating the seven other competitors, and then flew off in a jet with an old Navy buddy, leaving a sonic boom in his wake. It wasn’t exactly the life Louise had envisioned.

  Opinions regarding Shepard’s fidelity to Louise varied wildly. At the time, indisputable facts were hard to come by, a testimony to either Shepard’s carefulness or the protection offered him by loyal friends and an obliging press. But in time it became clear that Alan and Louise, either tacitly or explicitly, operated under a marital understanding.

  Some friends thought Shepard had a “compulsion” to be around other women. “He had a beautiful wife and family. I just never quite understood it,” said Al Blackburn, a Naval Academy classmate and fellow test pilot. Others, like Bill Dana, maintain that Shepard may have been “a bit of a rascal” but that “there was a lot of mythology about it.” Dana believes that if Alan Shepard did all the fooling around that was attributed to him, “his dick would have fallen off.”

  NBC reporter Jay Barbree, who covered the Mercury Seven and years later would collaborate with Shepard and Slayton on a book about the space race, recalled the story of a pretty folk singer named Trish who performed regularly at the Cape. Rumors began circulating that Trish had slept with all seven of the astronauts. Barbree said that in truth, she had slept with only one of the seven—and it wasn’t Shepard.

  Barbree recalled seeing Shepard take Trish home one night and, Shepard told him later, stay for a drink—but nothing more. “It was the appearance they were after,” Barbree said. “Shepard wanted his buddies to believe he was seeing Trish.”

  Not that flings weren’t happening. Barbree said the Cape oozed sexuality. An attractive woman once offered him sex in exchange for the sports car he drove. Barbree later learned that the young woman was dating one of the astronauts. “I see you met Diane,” Gordo Cooper told Barbree one night in his lazy Oklahoma twang.

  Still, like Dana, Barbree thinks that if the astronauts had all the sex they got credit for, “they would have never gone to the moon. They’d have been in bed all the time.”

  One of Louise’s closest friends, Loraine Meyer, with whom she would one day open a needlepoint shop, said Louise never discussed Alan’s promiscuity with her. “We were best friends, but that was one thing we didn’t discuss,” Meyer recalled. She believes Alan and Louise were “very much in love” and that if they did have any marital woes, they worked them out in private.

  Whatever deeper truths lay beneath Alan and Louise’s complicated marriage, one thing was certain to all who knew them at the time: Alan did not practice fidelity. But he was not the only unfaithful astronaut, and the risks of skirt chasing while the press was watching began to create growing conflict among the Mercury Seven.

  12

  “I think I got myself in trouble”

  Back in 1959, to commemorate his graduation from test pilot to spaceman, Shepard had traded his peppy little oil-spewing green MG ragtop for one of the sexiest American vehicles ever produced. The glossy white Corvette flaunted whitewall tires and a menacing chrome grille that looked like some wild animal’s snarling teeth. At first America didn’t know what to make of Chevy’s new sports cars, and less than ten thousand were sold in the first few years of production. But to Shepard, his secondhand Corvette was worth every bit of the $3,000 price tag. He would drive ’Vettes for the next thirty years, and the car would become an accoutrement for many future astronauts, a jet-shaped and sensual symbol of their coming of age.

  Shortly after purchasing his new toy, Shepard invited Life photographer Ralph Morse for a ride. He wanted to show Ralph how fast it could fly, with its huge eight-cylinder, 230-horsepower engine. “Goes like a bat out of hell,” Shepard promised.

  Morse asked how they’d find a straightaway around Langley that was long enough to get up any speed. And, if they did, how would they avoid getting arrested? Despite a nose for a good story, Morse didn’t want to be implicated with the first jailed astronaut. Shepard solved both problems by calling the tower at Langley’s airfield to get permission to use their runway. Then he roared at a hundred miles an hour down the tarmac, with Morse scrunched in his seat.

  When GM officials learned that a famous astronaut was a loyal ’Vette fan, they smelled a publicity opportunity for the struggling model and arranged a meeting between Shepard and the Corvette’s chief engineer, Zora Arkus-Duntov. The two men hit it off and Arkus-Duntov convinced a reluctant GM management to donate a brand-new Corvette
to Shepard, which was of course even faster.

  Mickey Kapp, who produced the José Jiménez albums, recalled that his first encounter with Shepard was an illegally speedy Corvette sprint down Route A1A, weaving through traffic at eighty miles an hour. Kapp was sure Shepard was trying to scare him. It was Shepard’s way of checking to see if Kapp had any guts. But Kapp, a car collector, had driven his share of fast cars, and he just sat there smiling and enjoying the ride.

  The astronauts’ training schedule left Shepard with little spare time to fly, and his velocious Corvette offered a modest substitute for such thrills. Just as he had with jets, Shepard was constantly trying to squeeze a little more horsepower from his car, which one day led him to Jim Rathmann.

  Rathmann was a handsome race car driver who, after two second-place finishes in the Indianapolis 500, finally won the race in 1960 in a back-and-forth contest that would go down as one of the most exciting races in Indianapolis history. Rathmann also owned a Chevrolet dealership and an adjacent mechanics’ shop near Cocoa Beach. Shepard was always bringing his car into Rathmann’s shop, asking him to tweak this or that, trying to get a little extra speed out of the big V-8.

  When Rathmann learned of Shepard’s love of his Corvette, he called his boss and friend, Ed Cole, Chevrolet’s chief engineer (soon to become president of General Motors). Cole had been an early believer in Chevy’s first true sports car and agreed to Rathmann’s plan to give all the astronauts special deals on Corvettes— and, they hoped, boost sales in the process.