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

by Neal Thompson

  Cooper and Grissom accepted GM’s offer and began driving brand-new Corvettes. Schirra swapped his Austin Healy for one but later switched back to European cars (and was punished for it by Cooper, who once hid a rotting fish in Schirra’s Maserati). Carpenter turned down the Corvette offer, preferring his souped-up Shelby Cobra. Slayton at the time drove a beat-up station wagon that, compared to the sports car crowd, made his family feel like “a bunch of Okies.” He was happy to trade the wagon for a ’Vette.

  Glenn, on the other hand, turned down the offer. He had recently traded his secondhand Studebaker for an obscure little German thing called an NSU Prinz, which he bought for $1,400 because of its great gas mileage. It got fifty miles to the gallon, and he could drive from his home in Arlington, Virginia, to Langley and back for less than a dollar. Scorning the others’ infatuation with race cars, Glenn one day copied on a classroom blackboard a quote he’d found in Reader’s Digest: “Definition of a sports car: a hedge against male menopause.”

  In the end, four astronauts—Shepard, Cooper, Grissom, and Slayton—accepted GM’s “executive lease” offer. They could lease a new Corvette for $1 a year, then trade it in at year’s end for a new model. Rathmann had no problem selling the slightly used astro- ’Vettes.

  At the end of a day’s training, Shepard, Cooper, and Grissom loved to race each other down some rural stretch of A1A. Sometimes they drove right on the hard-packed beach, and once used one of their Corvettes for water-skiing—they hooked a tow rope to the back and cruised down the beach, pulling the skier through the surf.

  The cars had wide tires that sometimes hydroplaned on wet pavement, and a few of the watching reporters cringed as the astronauts sped through Cocoa Beach, swerving and fishtailing. Shepard once spun out on a rain-slicked bridge, narrowly missing an oncoming car. Grissom once let Rathmann drive his ’Vette and, sitting in the passenger seat, dared Rathmann to take a tight corner at eighty miles an hour. He did, but the car spun out and slid two hundred feet off the road into a mud pit, where it had to be yanked free by a tow truck. The reporters couldn’t write about all they saw, but privately they expected one of the country’s new heroes to slam into a tree. “Some of us were concerned they’d kill themselves—and lose a big investment on the government’s part. Or maybe knock off some kid,” recalled Bill Hines, a writer with the former Washington Star and, later, the Chicago Sun-Times.

  At first Shepard won many of the three-way races against Cooper and Grissom. But suddenly, after one of his tune-ups at Rathmann’s place, Shepard began losing the races, badly. And it drove him crazy.

  “What the hell’s going on?” he complained one day.

  “You lost, Alan,” Grissom told him. “Guess you lost your touch.”

  “My ass. There’s something wrong with this car,” Shepard insisted.

  Often he would get out and kick the car after losing. After a few more lost races, Grissom and Cooper let him in on the joke. Rathmann had adjusted the gear ratios on Shepard’s car so that it accelerated more slowly than normal.

  “Gotcha,” Cooper said, and slapped Shepard on the back. But Shepard had never been much of a sport when he found himself on the losing end of a gotcha, and had to force himself to keep his hands off Cooper’s neck.

  Such juvenile and combative head-butting rituals reflected the surging intensity of the competition for the first space ride. Working out the many kinks in its troubled rockets had forced NASA to delay its tentative plans for a manned launch in 1960. But things were looking good for early the following year, and the astronauts knew NASA would decide soon who’d ride that historic flight.

  At times Henri Landwirth felt caught between his two favorite astronauts: Alan Shepard and John Glenn. He knew they were two very different men, but there were qualities in each that, Landwirth felt, strangely complemented the other.

  He heard the gripes about Glenn from others. There was the friend of Glenn’s who told a Life reporter that “John tries to behave as if every impressionable youngster in the country were watching him every moment of the day.” And there was the time Schirra gave Glenn a boatload of grief after watching him return to the Holiday Inn from an alleged run on the beach, then splash water on his face so it looked like sweat. But Landwirth generally got along well with Glenn, who could “make me laugh.”

  Shepard, on the other hand, could infuriate Landwirth with his sarcasm. “I could have choked him at times in the old days,” he recalled. And he thought Shepard’s pranks could be mean-spirited. One time Shepard and Leo D’Orsey made plans to meet with Landwirth at a hotel in Miami. They told Landwirth the hotel didn’t allow Jews, so they would have to sneak him in. Putting a raincoat over Landwirth’s head, they scuttled him through the lobby and into a service elevator, where they confessed that they were just messing with him, and both busted out laughing.

  Landwirth came to learn, however, that if you put up with Shepard’s sharp edges, his antagonism and unpredictable moods, and earned his trust, the payoff was a loyal friend and “a great charmer and a gentleman.”

  He was always impressed when he’d watch Shepard work a crowd. Though with colleagues or fans, Shepard could so often be icily antisocial, at certain social events he could “charm a whole room by himself—I don’t care how many people were there,” Landwirth recalled. “Especially the women.”

  Freed from wearing the required Navy uniform each day, a latent predilection for style also emerged, and Shepard established himself as the best-dressed of the astronauts.

  Different as Shepard and Glenn were, Landwirth saw qualities the other astronauts didn’t seem to possess. Also, each seemed to be planning far sooner than the others for their life after space. In time, Landwirth would help each of them in different ways. For Shepard, Landwirth would boost him toward riches. Glenn would get a boost toward political power. And one day Shepard and Glenn would repay Landwirth handsomely.

  But in 1960, Landwirth’s friendship with Shepard and Glenn put him in a tricky spot between the two most aggressive competitors among the Mercury Seven. While Landwirth had the luxury of befriending them both, the other astronauts would have to choose. And deciding between Shepard and Glenn would lead to fissures between the seven, deep and complicated divisions that would break the team apart.

  Glenn tried diplomatically to divert the media’s attention from the competition for the first flight, claiming to one reporter that the space race was “bigger than one individual.” But Shepard, in an interview at the time, made no such pretensions. He told a reporter that he had always been competitive—still was. “I want to be first because I want to be first,” he said. “There are lots of ways to answer why I want to be first in space,” he continued, “but the short answer would be this: the flight obviously is a challenge, and I feel that the more severe challenge will occur on the first flight and I signed up to accept this challenge. And that’s why I want to be first.”

  Among the many small pieces of Shepard’s larger game plan was an effort to finally quit smoking. Shepard sometimes dropped his pack of cigarettes on the desk of the pretty new secretary, Lola Morrow, with instructions to give him only one cigarette at a time, and only when it was an emergency. Lola, who herself was trying to quit, soon had a drawer full of cigarette packs from Shepard and the other smokers.

  He didn’t ease up much on the syrupy thick coffee he loved, or the regular cocktails, but quitting the smokes was a step toward reclaiming the strong and wiry rower’s body he’d once doted on back at Annapolis, the one he’d honed as a teen by swimming with a boat in tow behind him. After taking up Glenn’s habit of early morning jogging, and in addition to playing feisty games of handball with Grissom and Slayton, Shepard began lifting weights in the gym NASA had built for the astronauts at the Cape.

  If NASA wanted a perfect specimen to become the first American in space, he intended to work harder than the other six in every way—in academics, in training exercises, and in matters of fitness and health.

  Inten
se as the competition among the Mercury Seven was, they all knew that their toughest competitors were the Russians. By the summer of 1960, the Russians had launched four more Sputnik satellites and three other satellites. In the three years since the first Sputnik, subsequent Soviet satellites had carried rabbits and mice into orbit. The United States had actually put up many more satellites than the Russians—two dozen between 1958 and 1960—and, by that tally, seemed way ahead of its communist competitors. But the Russians always seemed to find a way to achieve the more impressive “firsts” of the space race— first satellite in space (1957), first dog in space (1957), first man-made object to strike the surface of the moon (1959), first photographs of the unseen far side of the moon (1959).

  In August 1960 they did it again. Russia’s rocket scientists shocked the world when they announced that two dogs—Belka and Strelka—had been launched into space (crammed inside a capsule along with forty mice and two rats), completed a series of orbits around the earth, and were then returned safe and sound back home. (Strelka later gave birth to six puppies, one of which Soviet premier Khrushchev obnoxiously sent to the White House.)

  After that, no amount of spin would convince the nation that the United States was—at least in terms of the total number of satellites launched into space—ahead of the Soviets in the space race. And even the astronauts began to agree. Slayton acknowledged as much to a reporter, admitting, “There is no doubt in my mind they will be first.”

  In an effort to gain some psychological leverage in the race with the Soviets, Shepard and the others compiled and signed a confidential letter to NASA officials, proposing what they called a sly “propaganda initiative.” Because the American astronauts were clearly in a neck-and-neck contest with the Russian cosmonauts, the Mercury Seven suggested an exchange of visits—the cosmonauts could come to the Cape and the astronauts could visit the Soviet space complex, the massive Baikonur Cosmodrome, on the barren steppes of western Kazakhstan. The idea was to gain some inside information on the secretive Russian space program. And if the Russians refused, it would “reflect unfavorably in the eyes of other countries,” the astronauts wrote.

  The letter, which was never made public, asserted that “we apparently stand to gain a great deal and could lose little or nothing.” But the idea found no takers. Generally, the astronauts and NASA officials tried to keep any us-versus-them sentiments from the public. In one press conference, when asked to compare the U.S. space program to Russia’s, Shepard vehemently denied that the American astronauts were in competition with the Soviets. Regardless of the “unfortunate clash of philosophies,” Shepard said, “our objective in this program is not to beat the Russians.” The same reporter asked if the Mercury Seven’s timetable would change to keep pace with the front-running Russians. Shepard’s response was terse: “No, sir.”

  But in a later interview with a National Geographic reporter, Shepard acknowledged that they had been “forced into a competitive race with another political philosophy.” And he let slip that NASA was “not making decisions based only on our own problems.” Meaning: We’re keeping a very close eye on the other side. NASA officials, who reviewed the story, deleted that quote from the final version.

  Another letter penned by the astronauts, which was also never made public, suggested accelerating the first manned launch—now tentatively scheduled for early 1961—by cutting back on unmanned Atlas rocket launches and other test launches with monkeys riding in the capsule, and proceeding more quickly to the one goal that really mattered. The astronauts recommended that NASA “move ahead the entire subsequent Atlas schedule so that it is possible to schedule . . . a manned orbital flight . . . with a tentative launch week of 28 Nov 60.” NASA thanked the astronauts for their input but did not change its schedule, and the astronauts felt increasingly frustrated by what they perceived to be NASA’s somewhat plodding progress.

  The space race had become the centerpiece of the tense geopolitical events of the escalating cold war, which had begun to take a few dangerous turns.

  When an American U-2 spy plane was shot down by Soviet missiles and crashed into Soviet territory on May 1, 1960, and its pilot—Francis Gary Powers, working for the Central Intelligence Agency—was captured, Khrushchev canceled a long-planned U.S.-Soviet summit meeting in Paris that summer. When Eisenhower refused to officially apologize for the Powers incident, Khrushchev canceled Eisenhower’s scheduled visit to Moscow as well. He did, however, keep his scheduled visit to the United Nations’ headquarters in New York that September, where he emotionally embraced Fidel Castro, flaunting his support for socialism’s new poster boy. Later in the UN session, Khrushchev famously pounded his white shoe on a table during a speech by British prime minister Harold Macmillan. Americans began asking themselves: Who is this communist wacko, and how dangerous is he?

  As the presidential campaign of 1960 heated up, John F. Kennedy shrewdly latched on to the cold war and the space race as themes for his campaign. He promised voters that, if elected, he would usher in a “New Frontier,” and his campaign became all about motion, about moving ahead, catching up. With a loud and confident rat-a-tat urgency in his voice, Kennedy bemoaned the “drift in our national course” and a “decline in our vitality.”

  Kennedy’s narrow defeat of Richard Nixon was due, at least in part, to his promise to restore the nation’s morale and geopolitical footing by regaining ground lost in the space race. And though Shepard and his family were Republicans, the election of a Democrat from Massachusetts would prove to be a fortunate thing for Shepard.

  After Kennedy’s election focused the spotlight even more intensely on the space program, John Glenn—the self-anointed moralist of the group—began agitating for the astronauts to clean up their behavior. All infidelities had to stop.

  “I thought we owed it to people to behave,” Glenn would write years later in his memoir. “It was now clear that, rightly or wrongly, we had been placed upon a pedestal.”

  The Mercury Seven had gotten into the habit of conducting regular closed-door meetings with one another to hash out any conflicts or disagreements. A NASA official called them “séances,” and the name stuck. Many of the séances devolved into shouting matches, and a couple of times the arguments teetered toward outright fistfights.

  Each man had his own trigger points and pet peeves. Slayton and Cooper once fought vigorously to have rudder pedals installed in the capsule so that it could be flown like an airplane; Shepard and Glenn, meanwhile, had argued for the hand control stick that was eventually used because it weighed less than the floor pedals. Like brothers, they fought hard, yelled loudly, and then settled on a compromise. “When we came out of the room, we had an astronaut opinion,” Cooper recalled—although he added, “some of us were more team players than others.”

  The two who didn’t always play by team rules were Glenn and Shepard. Glenn was a politician about his disagreements; Shepard was a bulldog. As a result, Shepard and Glenn—the two clear front-runners in the race for the first flight—bumped heads more than most.

  In fact, they sometimes openly taunted each other. Shepard thought Glenn took the training exercises too seriously. He said Glenn’s experiment with dehydration during desert training had been too risky. And he thought it was hilarious when Glenn once waved off a rescue helicopter and tried to ride a raft ashore like a surfboard while practicing escape procedures in rough seas off the Florida coast. He got pummeled by the waves and rolled head over heels to shore. Glenn, meanwhile, thought Shepard was too cavalier, with his occasional partying and Corvette racing.

  The personal combat between the two came to a head during one trip to San Diego. When they visited San Diego, the astronauts usually stayed at the waterfront Konakai cottages owned by one of NASA’s contractors. Late one night, shortly after midnight, one of the astronauts knocked on the door of Glenn’s cottage and said, “I think I got myself in trouble.” The astronaut had gone out drinking across the border in nearby Tijuana, Mexico, and had pi
cked up a woman at a bar. Later, when the two were alone, he saw flashes and realized someone was taking pictures.

  The next day, a “leading West Coast paper” called Shorty Powers to get a reaction to the story it was planning to run—with “compromising” photographs—the following day. Shorty, who in recent months had been warning Glenn about just such a problem, called Glenn later that night and said, “Well, it’s happened.”

  Glenn immediately called the publisher of the newspaper and begged him to kill the story. He laid it on thick: They were in a race with “godless communists,” he said, and the bad guys were ahead. The press had to help in the effort to “get back in the space race.” If they didn’t, they’d only be hurting the country. Negative press could affect the amount of funding NASA got from Congress, and also the nation’s morale.

  Until that moment, most of the stories about the astronauts —particularly Life’s whitewashed version of astronaut life—had been, as Glenn once put it, “bland and upbeat.” For the most part, the press had continued to willingly participate in the conspiracy of silence. This story would be an absolute scandal. Glenn wasn’t about to get sullied by association, nor was he about to let the entire program be hurt. In the end the newspaper backed down.

  “I pulled out all the stops,” Glenn later wrote in his memoir. “To this day, and knowing the press much better now, I’m still amazed that it didn’t run.”

  Later that day, at the Konakai cottages, Glenn called for a séance. With the seven men in one room, he angrily announced that they had just “dodged a bullet.” “I was mad, and I read the riot act, saying that we had worked too hard to get into this program and that it meant too much to the country to see it jeopardized by anyone who couldn’t keep his pants zipped,” Glenn said.