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

by Neal Thompson

  Among Peter Vanderhoef’s list of famous friends was Ginger Rogers, a devout Christian Scientist. When the actress learned that Peter was friends with Shepard, she insisted he host a dinner party so that she could meet the heroic astronaut. Vanderhoef was also friends with actor Gordon MacRae, a former classmate of his. MacRae also wanted to meet the Shepards—it always intrigued Vanderhoef how celebrities wanted to meet other celebrities. A dinner party was scheduled, but history would intervene. President Kennedy was coming to town. It would be his final visit with the astronauts.

  On November 18 Kennedy toured Cape Canaveral. Wearing dark sunglasses, he walked around the base of the new Saturn rocket, looking up in awe at the massive booster engine—the strongest ever built, and a predecessor to the one designed to reach the moon.

  Then Kennedy flew to Houston to tour the burgeoning Manned Space Center. From there he traveled to a NASA medical facility in San Antonio, where he reminded America that it was still “a time for pathfinders and pioneers.” There he told the story of a group of boys walking across the Irish countryside who came to an orchard wall that seemed too high to climb. They tossed their hats over, forcing themselves to find a way to the other side. “This nation has tossed its cap over the wall of space, and we have no choice but to follow it,” he said on November 21. “Whatever the difficulties, they will be overcome.”

  The next morning, as he rode waving through the streets of Dallas, Kennedy was shot dead. Alan and Louise’s dinner with Gordon MacRae had been scheduled for that evening at the Vanderhoefs. But Alan called that afternoon to cancel. “They were too shook up,” Vanderhoef recalled. Shepard had always considered Kennedy a “space cadet,” a genuine fan of their feats, someone who was truly excited about what humankind had done and could do in space. He was shocked and devastated by Kennedy’s death—and more than a little worried. What will this do to the space program? he thought.

  About the time of Kennedy’s assassination, the frightening, confusing episodes that left Shepard heaped and gasping on the floor were becoming more and more frequent. The worst had occurred one morning only six weeks into his Gemini training.

  As he awoke and stepped from the bedroom, the floor tilted like a carnival fun house and he fell to the floor, hanging on to the carpet as if gravity itself had suddenly quit. Then he crawled slowly to the nearest wall and struggled to stand. When he finally reached the bathroom, he felt his stomach roll over and he vomited. And then again.

  Jesus, what the hell did I drink last night? he wondered. It was just like the woozy aftermath of a brutal session in the MASTIF trainer—nausea, dizziness, and a momentary loss of the basic ability to stand straight.

  In fact, the doctors had wondered about Shepard’s slow recovery from one of his MASTIF sessions a few years earlier. Shepard had hit the chicken switch to stop the whirling contraption, then got sick all over the floor and had to lie down awhile on the cot. They didn’t feel it was serious enough to keep him from piloting Freedom 7. But years later they’d look back and wonder: Is that where the problem began?

  After vomiting that frightening morning at home, he sat in his bathroom until the episode passed. Louise offered to drive him to work, but he said he could drive, and made it into the office feeling better, though a bit nervous. The next week it happened again. This time the spinning and vomiting were joined by a loud, metallic ringing in his left ear. In subsequent weeks the episodes continued to come and go. The pills he had been taking seemed to be no help at all. Friends and colleagues would not learn until many years later just how bad these early episodes were and just how hard Shepard had tried to keep them a secret. “He hid that well,” Wally Schirra said.

  This wasn’t an injury that he could just shake off. It was, it seemed, a disease. And in the astronaut world, disease was unseemly.Shepard began to worry about keeping up with his Gemini training. He knew that if the ailment was serious, he could be pulled off the flight. But he also knew that if an episode struck during his mission, he—and his partner, Tom Stafford—would be dead.

  Finally his secret revealed itself. He was giving a lecture one day, standing on a podium in Houston, when the room began to wobble. He clutched the dais and shut his eyes, blinking back the kaleidoscopic spinning. He had to be helped from the stage and sat in a chair off to the side until the dizziness ceased and he could walk. With his illness so publicly displayed, he had no choice but to walk into Slayton’s office and confess. Slayton persuaded Shepard to visit NASA’s doctors, which he did later that day. It pained him to tell the astronaut’s physician, Dr. Charles Berry, “I’m having a problem. . . . It was a big problem, and it got worse.”

  Berry and the other NASA doctors did a series of tests and tried various medications, hoping the condition was temporary or at least controllable. During one exam they asked Shepard to stand on one foot. He had survived so many tests up to this point—centrifuge runs, MASTIF sessions, weightlessness training inside nose-diving cargo planes—but now he couldn’t even balance on one foot. When the final round of testing was completed, Dr. Berry was out of town, and it fell to a young doctor named Duane Caterson to call America’s first spaceman to his office to break the news. “You’re medically grounded, compadre,” Caterson said.

  The diagnosis was that fluids were regularly building up in the semicircular canals of Shepard’s left inner ear, wreaking havoc with the mechanisms controlling his body’s balance. That, in turn, caused vertigo—an extreme form of dizziness—along with nausea, temporary loss of hearing, ringing in the ear, and a constant feeling that his ear needed to pop. The attacks were intermittent, but they were severe and unpredictable. The condition, Ménière’s disease, was called an “elusive affliction,” meaning doctors had no clue what caused it. In fact, some doctors at the time considered it a self-induced psychosomatic affliction. What they did know was that there was no cure.

  Shepard took the news silently—“stoically,” Berry recalled. But Shepard said later he was in shock: “total disbelief that they could ground the best pilot they ever had.” He took a modicum of comfort in learning that his condition was, as he liked to tell people, “a result of being hyper.” It was true—Ménière’s was more prevalent in type A people, those who were hyperactive, competitive, and driven. At least, Shepard felt, it was ambition that had hurt him, not weakness. “Maybe it’s the price I pay,” he told himself at the time. “And if that’s the price I have to pay for looking at myself in the mirror, then I’ll take it. What the hell.”

  At first the grounding was temporary. Doctors gave him more medication—diuretics to help drain fluid from his ears and other pills to increase blood circulation—and said there was a 20 percent chance the disease would cure itself. But when it failed to abate or respond to treatment, Berry decided they “couldn’t pretend any longer,” and the grounding became permanent. Not only did Shepard lose his Gemini flight, but he was also barred from flying NASA’s jets unless another pilot was flying with him.

  Slayton, thanks to his heart ailment, was not allowed to fly jets alone, either. Two of the Mercury Seven, two of Kennedy’s space pioneers, now couldn’t even fly a Piper Cub without someone else on board to baby-sit them. That painful truth became apparent one day when Shepard and Slayton requested a NASA jet to ride from Houston to the Cape. “I’m sorry, you can’t do that,” Berry told them. “I know this sounds horrible, but two half pilots don’t make a whole. You have to have another qualified pilot with you.”

  During the many medical exams that followed, doctors also discovered, to their surprise and his, that Shepard was suffering from a mild case of glaucoma—increased fluid pressure behind the eyes, which can cause nerve damage. That, too, was a symptom of chronic hyperactivity. Doctors felt the pressure from the glaucoma, which may have been with him since birth, was responsible for Shepard’s bulging eyes. And that wasn’t the last of his medical woes.

  In late 1963 Shepard also began complaining of a sore throat and tried hard to convince his doctors it w
as nothing more than that. When they finally X-rayed his neck they found a small lump on his thyroid, the gland in the neck whose secretions control the body’s metabolism. Doctors determined that his thyroid, which they found to be slightly enlarged, was another contributor to his buggy eyes. Shepard joked with NASA officials: “Too bad it didn’t cause another part of my anatomy to bulge.”

  In mid-January of 1964 Shepard underwent surgery to have the lump removed. Surgeons cut just below his Adam’s apple and removed 20 percent of his enlarged thyroid. The next day’s papers showed Shepard smiling in his bathrobe, reading Of Spies and Stratagems (the biography of biochemist and spy Stanley Lovell), and the article said the surgery would “have no effect on his status in the space program.” But Shepard’s status, unbeknownst to the press, was that he had been grounded for months and was likely to stay there. He had just turned forty the previous November, and it looked as if his astronaut career was over. Plus he was too old to return to the Navy and back onto the admiral-bound career track he had abandoned.

  The press had been told none of this. NASA wouldn’t announce for another few months that Shepard had lost his Gemini flight, and when the announcement was made, Shepard’s condition would at first be described simply as “an ear infection.” Meanwhile, John Glenn experienced eerily similar medical problems of his own.

  Ever since his wildly successful orbital flight in February 1962, Glenn—just like Shepard—had been pestering NASA officials for another flight. He had continued to train with the new groups of astronauts but felt like he was being “stonewalled” every time he asked about the possibility of a flight. He knew Shepard had been assigned the first Gemini flight and that Grissom had been assigned the second flight, but he could never get a straight answer on when he’d fly next.

  At the same time, Bobby Kennedy—who had become one of Glenn’s close friends—kept whispering in his ear: Join us. Run for the Senate. Be a politician.

  Finally, toward the end of 1963, Glenn asked a NASA official straight up whether he’d ever fly again. The answer: not likely. NASA didn’t want to risk losing its top star, its prime poster boy. In fact, President Kennedy himself had secretly told NASA officials that Glenn was a national asset whose life couldn’t be endangered. Maybe, the NASA official suggested, Glenn would want to become an administrator. Instead, Glenn heeded Bobby Kennedy’s call and opted for politics. He resigned from NASA and on January 17, 1964—the same day Shepard entered Hermann Hospital for his thyroid surgery—Glenn announced his candidacy for the U.S. Senate in Ohio.

  A few weeks into his campaign Glenn stood looking at himself in the bathroom mirror of an apartment that a campaign patron had rented for him. He was due to meet his advisers for a briefing later that morning, but something about the reflection bothered him. It was the mirror—it wasn’t sitting properly in the tracks of the vanity above the sink. As he tried to fix the mirror, it fell toward him. He threw his hands up to block the mirror, but as he ducked, the bath mat beneath his feet slipped. He fell and slammed his head into the metal shower door track on the rim of the bathtub. After a few moments of unconsciousness, he awoke to find himself kneeling in a pool of blood. The mirror had smashed over his head, and the blow from the bathtub caused his head to swell.

  Subsequent X rays found a mild concussion, but more serious was some damage to his vestibular system—the canals and delicate structures of the inner ear that serve as the body’s balancing mechanism. Swelling and blood in Glenn’s inner ear caused the same symptoms as Ménière’s disease, but worse. He couldn’t walk or even sit in a chair. If he moved his head just an inch, it brought waves of dizziness and nausea. For weeks he was confined to a San Antonio hospital bed, “virtually immobile.”

  When Shepard’s condition became public a few months later, the press pounced on Glenn’s nearly identical affliction. The strange twist of coincidence—the fact that the two most famous astronauts had met similar vertiginous fates—created a brief flurry of media speculation about the dangers of space flight. In March Glenn held a news conference in his hospital room and withdrew from the Senate race. His political life seemed to have died before it even began, and as he wondered what road to take next, he had plenty of time to “contemplate the irony” of surviving space “only to be brought down by a slippery bath mat on a tile floor.”

  Glenn considered returning to NASA, which was anxious to have him back on board—at least in an ambassadorial or administrative role. But Glenn knew his chances of another flight were slim to none, and decided that he didn’t want to become the oldest astronaut trainer and “a used astronaut.” In much the same way, Shepard contemplated his own future. If he stayed with NASA, he seemed headed toward the exact fate that Glenn feared—a used astronaut. He asked himself, and he asked Louise: “What do I do now? Go back to the Navy? Stick around with the space program?”

  Finally he met with Slayton and asked his advice. “Should I just hang it up?”

  Slayton told him to stick around. “I’ve got a job for you,” he said.

  Shepard stuck around, but many of his peers—the second-and third-generation astronauts who had once considered him one “lucky son of a bitch”—wished he hadn’t. Because he would soon become, simply, a son of a bitch.

  17

  How to succeed in business without really fllying—much

  While researching a book about space, Italian writer Oriana Fallaci arrived in Houston one hot and sticky day, rented a car, and drove south to the Manned Space Center for a scheduled meeting with Shepard. She had already met Dee O’Hara, Deke Slayton, Wernher von Braun, and others. But she was intensely curious about the man who’d led America into space. What traits distinguished him from the others? Shepard greeted her with a warm smile—a smile that made her wary from the start.

  A petite, chain-smoking, mischievous blonde, Fallaci had a reputation for antagonizing interviewees. She once called Norman Mailer “an apologist for violence” and asked Hugh Hefner if he actually liked women, “beyond the sex, I mean.” As she sat in Shepard’s office, assessing his warm but wary smile, she thought he vaguely resembled a carnivorous plant she once saw in a London botanical garden. He was attractive without being overtly handsome, she thought, but his features were all oversized— protruding lips, large teeth, round eyes that seemed “hungry, and so large.”

  “Tall and slim, he emanated virility,” she’d later write in If the Sun Dies, the story of her yearlong quest to understand the purpose and people of the space age. “[But] he reminded me of nobody—that mouth, those teeth, those eyes were unique.” Fallaci didn’t hesitate. She pounced on him with questions, asking Shepard if he suffered from any psychological “complex” as the first American in space. Shepard kept smiling. “That flight was a personal victory for me, a challenge to the others,” he said. But no, he had no complex. Then she asked if he was jealous of Yuri Gagarin. “Of course I was jealous, I’m still jealous,” he said. “But the fact remains that I had the satisfaction of being the first American.”

  Shepard went on to explain that beyond being the first into space, he was also among six Americans to have flown into space alone, since all future flights would now carry two to three astronauts. And he had deserved it, had earned it all. Then he leaned forward, the warm smile cooling a degree or two. “Now what are you going to ask?”

  Fallaci tried to stare back, to challenge him, “but his eyes swallowed up mine.” Shepard told her she was being “too romantic” about space and stars. Then he tried to sell her one of the race horses he had begun raising on his ranch. Or if not a horse, maybe she’d like to buy one of his cows. “You need a cow,” he told her.

  On days like that, Slayton might have regretted asking Shepard to forgo retirement to become head of the astronaut office. Slayton would find Shepard to be a less than diplomatic administrator and a fairly ineffectual public relations tool.

  Slayton had known that Shepard, despite his illness, wasn’t ready to retire. If there was a sliver of a chance
for another flight—and there still was—he’d stay with the program. That’s what kept Slayton going, too, willing to work as an astronaut baby-sitter until he’d again become a full-fledged astronaut.

  About the time the doctors were giving Shepard doses of bad news and ineffective pills, Slayton had been promoted to chief of flight crew operations. That meant he needed someone to take over his old job running the astronaut office, and he asked Shepard. At first Shepard couldn’t picture himself “changing diapers and feeding astronauts.” Worse than that, he told Slayton, he’d have to watch all the younger pups fly toward the moon ahead of him.

  When he accepted Slayton’s offer, Shepard began wearing the job, and his resentment, like a hair shirt. His daily treatment of his new charges was unpredictable and often aggressive. Shepard was never known for being pals with the newer crops of astronauts. Few of them would forget Shepard’s attitude toward them during the requisite interview at the Rice Hotel prior to their selection. Gene Cernan, one of the fourteen selected for the third group of astronauts, recalled that Shepard’s “cold eyes seemed to look right through me . . . It seemed wise for a rookie like me to steer clear of Alan B. Shepard.” Cernan considered Shepard “the best of the bunch” but “a total mystery.”

  When Shepard took over the astronaut office, his coworkers bestowed a number of monikers on him, with “the Icy Commander” topping the list. Others weren’t so complimentary. Some of the NASA contractors called him “the Snake.” A Life magazine writer called him “a bastard” and “the enforcer.” “He didn’t make a lot of friends in that period,” Walter Cronkite recalled. Nor was he an easy man to live with. Louise once said that being grounded was “the worst thing that can happen to a flyer . . . I mean, the mental anguish.”