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

by Neal Thompson

  When he wasn’t playing in his backyard he’d fly to Phoenix, Hawaii, or Palm Springs to play with friends or at a charity tournament. He and Louise often traveled to Morocco, where they’d play in King Hassan II’s annual tournament. He’d take friends or, one time, his daughter to Frank Sinatra’s house outside Palm Springs after a tournament. He once canceled plans with another friend so he could play a round with Tiger Woods.

  At seventy-one, he was in perfect health, living high above the glory of Pebble Beach, flush with money, fame, and fortune, enjoying the type of retirement most men dream of. But the days of idyllic retirement would end all too soon.

  In 1996 Shepard was diagnosed with leukemia.

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  “This is the toughest man I’ve ever met”

  Shepard’s illness wasn’t apparent immediately. He was a proud man who tried to hide it, and at first he succeeded. But to those who looked closely, there were signs.

  In October 1996 the Naval Academy’s athletic director, Jack Lengyl, called to tell Shepard the rowing team had purchased a new racing shell and planned to name it after him. At the christening ceremony for the Alan B. Shepard Jr., Shepard stood at the podium on a dock beside College Creek and spoke for forty passionate minutes about what the Naval Academy meant to him. He placed flowers on the boat and, per tradition, poured water over the bow. The crew climbed into the boat, shoved off from the dock, and rowed off a few hundred yards. They turned around, and as they glided back past the dock the crew lifted their oars into the sideways “stiff-oar” salute position. Shepard walked to the edge of the water and saluted back.

  Midshipmen on the dock stood gape-mouthed as tears sprang to the eyes of the steely American hero. There was hardly a dry eye in the crowd. Afterward Shepard climbed into his limousine and told the driver to turn right instead of left toward the exit. Lengyl would learn later that Shepard already knew he was sick. He wanted to tour “the Yard”—the launching pad of his Navy career—one last time. Indeed, it would be the last time he would set foot on the Naval Academy grounds.

  That same year Shepard and three of his old Naval Academy classmates—including his roommate, Bob Williams—got together for two days of golf. Shepard’s swing had never been great, but this weekend it was particularly weak. No power, no distance, no “miles and miles.” Williams knew something was wrong. Shepard and his old roommate shared a cart, but Shepard spent very little time in it. Instead of riding in the cart from one shot to the next, he ran. It was a very strange round of golf, with Shepard swinging like an old man, then jogging a hundred yards up to his ball. Later, over drinks, Shepard confessed that he was sick. “But I’m going to beat this,” he said.

  Also in 1996 Shepard played so poorly in his favorite golf tournament—the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, played annually in his backyard—that the tournament’s organizers decided not to invite the perennial competitor back again. The tournament, which began in the 1950s as “Bing Crosby’s Clam Bake,” was notorious for being marred by torrential rains and fierce winds, and for the wildly erratic play of some celebrity amateurs; Gerald Ford famously sprayed balls into the crowds, where many fans wore hard hats. One year Shepard watched in amazement as actor James Garner punched out a drunken heckler. It was one of his favorite weeks of the year.

  The 1996 tournament coincided with the twenty-fifth anniversary of Shepard’s six-iron shot on the moon, and Shepard allowed the TV reporters to interview him about that after playing a five-hole Celebrity Challenge charity event with Bill Murray, Clint Eastwood, John Denver, and Kevin Costner, who won the event. But Shepard, as usual, played poorly. The AT&T accepted only golfers with a handicap of eighteen or less. Shepard was listed at the limit, eighteen, and across three decades at the Crosby/AT&T would annually end up with some of the worst scores of the tournament. After his lousy performance that year, tournament officials finally decided that enough was enough. He was crushed, hurt, and humiliated. The blow was especially painful because in 1997 he also learned that he wasn’t just sick. He was, indeed, dying.

  At first, after some intense drug treatments and blood transfusions, the leukemia had seemed headed toward remission. Just as he had beaten back his Ménière’s disease, it had seemed for a while as if he might also beat his cancer. But the leukemia returned in full force in 1997. His confidence remained high, but the doctors’ reports told a different story. So he finally began telling his friends the truth.

  One night Shepard and his record producer friend Mickey Kapp were having drinks at the Pebble Beach country club, and Kapp asked, innocently enough, how Shepard was feeling. “Well,” he said, “the docs tell me I have a touch of leukemia. But I’ll beat it.” Kapp had no words. He thought, This is the toughest man I’ve ever met.

  Because of his age, Shepard was not a candidate for a bone marrow transplant. The best he could do was visit the local hospital, Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula, for blood transfusions. He’d check in under an assumed name and have his diseased blood drained and replaced with donor blood. Then he’d walk out feeling better—he called it his twice-monthly “pinking up.” But two weeks later he’d be pale and weak again. If anyone asked, he’d say, “I’ve lived a good life, I have no regrets, I’m not afraid. Nor am I ready to stop fighting.” Instead, he traveled the country looking for a cure. His almost desperate travels took him one day to the home of his old competitor, John Glenn.

  In 1996 NASA had announced that Glenn would be granted his long-simmering wish to return to space. Unlike Shepard, Glenn was still flying planes, was in perfect health, and had convinced NASA to exploit the scientific value of sending an octogenarian into the heavens. Shepard’s record of being, at age forty-seven, the oldest spaceman had already been shattered many times over. Prior to Glenn’s return to space, the oldest astronaut had been sixty-one. But Glenn was scheduled to surpass all records. If his late 1998 space shuttle launch was a success, he would be the first seventy-eight-year-old in space.

  As part of his training, Glenn became involved with scientists at the National Institute on Aging, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland. When Shepard asked for his help, Glenn made some calls to leukemia experts there. He found to his dismay that there wasn’t much the NIH experts could offer. Shepard’s disease, they’d determined, was indeed incurable; it was just a matter of time before his body surrendered. Glenn did convince NIH doctors to contact Shepard’s doctors in Monterey, and they suggested tweaks in Shepard’s treatment.

  In the early summer of 1998, as Glenn continued training for his space flight, Shepard agreed to a television interview to discuss Glenn’s impending return to orbit. Shepard reminisced about his own two space flights and told the CNN reporter that traveling to the moon “wasn’t that exciting.” But standing on the surface, looking down on the earth . . . that had profoundly changed his life. He had always lacked the eloquence to explain who he was, how he felt, what the earth looked like from space, and especially what the moon meant to him. Usually he didn’t see the point in explaining or exposing himself. But now, with the end of life looming ahead, he offered a rare public description of how he’d stood beside his lunar module, Antares, waiting for Ed Mitchell to join him on the surface and “thinking about the millions and millions of people that are down there . . . trying to get along, desperately trying to get along.” The reporter seemed taken aback: “Terrific . . . That was great.”

  Shepard added that he was happy his friend Glenn was getting a chance to be up there again looking down. But when the reporter asked if Shepard would like to go back up, he said, “I think I’m through,” adding, “given a good solid physical condition, I would probably say, ‘Hell, yes, I want to go again.’ But I think I’ve . . . I’m finished.”

  The reporter tried a joke, encouraging Shepard to “never say never.” Shepard’s response was “Go talk to my doctor.”

  A few months before that CNN interview, in late 1997, Shepard had been roasted at a celebratory dinner in
the ballroom of the Peabody Hotel in Orlando, where Henri Landwirth threw an annual black-and-white gala to thank the benefactors of his Give Kids the World foundation. Landwirth always timed the event to coincide with the annual Astronaut Scholarship Foundation meeting, and Shepard and the others looked forward to the yearly reunion. In 1997 the dinner commemorated the end of Shepard’s tenure as head of the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation. He had realized he was too sick to carry on and had decided to hand the reins over to Jim Lovell. The roasters knew he was sick, but they put on a good face, digging up funny old Shepard stories from the good old days. Louise sat by his side, still lovely at seventy-four, laughing heartily and whispering now and then in his ear, asking how he felt. He’d had a blood transfusion the previous day, but a nurse stood backstage just in case.

  At evening’s end, Don Engen, a former Navy test pilot and flying buddy of Shepard’s who had become head of the National Air and Space Museum, stepped to the podium. After a few jokes he announced that he had a surprise. “You’ve been bugging me about this for years, Al,” he said. “Well, I give up . . . Apollo 14 is all yours.”

  What he meant was this: The capsule that in 1971 had been Shepard’s cocoon for nine days, to and from the moon, across half a million miles, at speeds up to twenty-four thousand miles an hour, which had been on display at the Smithsonian in Washington, would finally be his. Shepard had been asking Engen for years to donate it to the scholarship foundation so that it could be displayed among the space suits, rockets, and memorabilia at its Astronaut Hall of Fame and Museum on the outskirts of Cape Kennedy. Clearly unprepared, Shepard was speechless. Tears suddenly filled his eyes, and his large lips trembled. “Oh, honey,” Louise said, and took his hand in hers. Glenn called it “a very emotional evening.”

  “People knew Al was sick,” he said. “But we didn’t know how long he had left.”

  The next day the ceremony continued at the Astronaut Hall of Fame, where Engen pulled a white sheet off the Apollo 14 command module, Kitty Hawk. Shepard stood at the foot of the space capsule, frail and full of drugs and disease, his hair thinned and his skin a bluish hue from the chemotherapy, looking so fragile. He reached out and touched Kitty Hawk ’s cool metal skin. Then, surrounded by his closest friends, the Icy Commander wept. His thin body shook, and he put his tear-streaked face in his hands. It would be the last time most of his friends saw him.

  On July 4, 1998, at a waterfront concert and picnic in Monterey, Shepard brought a couple of bottles of his favorite California chardonnay. He and Louise sat on a blanket. He waved and acknowledged the applause when the bandleader introduced him.

  On July 7 Mickey Kapp met Shepard for a drink at the Pebble Beach golf lodge. Shepard seemed in good spirits, reporting that his blood test results were good. People stopped by to ask how he was feeling, and he gave them all a thumbs-up.

  On July 20 Louise took him to the hospital in Monterey. He was having stomach pains. It didn’t seem serious. It didn’t seem like the end. But he slipped into sleep, and the next night, at about nine-thirty, at age seventy-four, he died.

  “Only battle I ever saw him lose,” Mickey Kapp said.

  Shepard would have been happy with the words in the newspapers. “One Cool Moonwalker,” “America’s Lindbergh of Space,” and “Rocket Man,” the press called him. He had once despised them—and the feeling was often mutual. But now they were kind, laudatory, and proud. They wrote how Shepard’s 1961 venture into space had given a troubled Kennedy administration a boost, how it had been a brave salvo in the cold war, how it had emboldened Kennedy to make his famous promise to reach the moon.

  And above all, the papers stressed that he was first. That, to him, had been paramount. Reaching the moon in 1971 was different. He talked less about that. That was, somehow, a personal thing. He’d fought back from the Ménière’s disease to get there. But ten years before that, being picked to be first into space— that was the thing.

  A man who as a boy was smaller, weaker, slower than most. A boy who pushed himself to be better than the others had become the man, the flyboy, he had always wanted to be. And so it was never the fifteen-minute Freedom 7 flight itself that symbolized his life. He’d had more thrilling adventures as a test pilot and fighter jock. But being chosen, that was the thing. Because for Shepard, life had been one big competition. “That was competition at its best,” Shepard had said just a few years earlier.

  A week later Louise flew to Houston for an August 1 memorial service at NASA. She seemed quiet but strong. Theirs had not been a perfect union, but they had survived many pitfalls, and Shepard’s name had not been lumped in with those of Scott Carpenter, Deke Slayton, Gordon Cooper, Ed Mitchell, Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and others, astronauts whose marriages ended in divorce. Or, in some cases, two or three divorces. One astronaut had seven wives in sixteen years. Partly it was Louise’s willingness to overlook things, to accept things. The payoffs were nights when she’d hear him tinkling at the keys of their piano, playing “Danny Boy” as she got dressed for a dinner date.

  And now here she was at his memorial service, listening to the piercing alto of a Navy choral singer singing their song, “Danny Boy,” to a crowd of NASA dignitaries.

  Glenn rose before the crowd and talked at length about Shepard the patriot, Shepard the leader, Shepard the friend, hero, and competitor—“a fierce competitor,” he called him—and then read a poem, a favorite for generations of aviators, called “High Flight.”

  Oh I have skipped the surly bonds of Earth And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings Sunward I’ve climbed and joined the tumbling mirth Of sunlit clouds and done a hundred things you have not dreamed of . . .

  Wally Schirra took the podium to claim how “the brotherhood we had will last forever.” But he couldn’t finish. He began sobbing, apologized, and walked back to his seat. Gordo Cooper spoke next. He looked to the sky and told Shepard, “We’ll be there before long.”

  As the crowd shuffled outside for a tree-planting ceremony, all heads looked up in response to the roar of four Navy jets. Just before crossing above Johnson Space Center, one jet peeled off from the rest—the missing-man formation Shepard so hated. Then they heard the painful first notes of the bugler blowing taps.

  That night Louise had dinner with her friends the Vanderhoefs, who back in the 1960s had introduced her and Alan to George and Barbara Bush and their kids. The Vanderhoefs were surprised at how composed Louise seemed. But the next day Louise spent all morning in her Houston hotel room. Another friend arrived to take Louise to lunch and found her sitting on the couch, looking terrible. The friend went to sit beside her, and like a deflated balloon Louise just folded, bursting into tears. They talked for an hour, missing lunch entirely, as Louise spoke of how much she missed him, how much she loved him, how she didn’t know what she would do now without him.

  She knew his illness had been terminal but never let herself believe it. Just like his “incurable” ear disease, she believed that he—they—would get through it somehow. She had prayed for him, was optimistic and hopeful like a good Christian Scientist. But this time it hadn’t worked. And now she dreaded the thought of returning to the house on the hill alone. Louise’s friends feared she might not be cut out for widowhood.

  Indeed, without her husband, Louise’s heart wasn’t right.

  Earlier that year she had begun experiencing a mild heart flutter, caused by an extra heartbeat. Despite her Christian Science instincts, Alan had convinced her to see a heart specialist, who had prescribed medicine for the occasional fibrillations. Some friends now wondered: With Alan gone, would she continue to take her heart medicine?

  After Shepard’s memorial service, Louise flew to Colorado to visit her daughter Laura. A month later she seemed ready to tackle the Pebble Beach house alone. She took a Tuesday morning flight to San Francisco, where she had to wait three hours to catch her connecting flight back to Monterey. The small propeller-driven commuter plane took off that afternoon, August 25, 1998
, and Louise sat quietly by herself, looking out at the Pacific.

  It was just a small plane, a short hop. There was no defibrillator aboard. When her heart stopped, there was nothing the flight attendants could do, and she died high above the Monterey Peninsula and the Pacific. The crew found a tag with Laura’s phone number on it and called to break the news.

  In the span of five weeks, they were both gone. The only minuscule sliver of consolation to the family was the timing of Louise’s death. She died at exactly 5 P.M.—the precise time Alan used to telephone her, year after year, when he was out of town. As their daughter Laura told a family friend, “Daddy called Mommy at about five o’clock in the afternoon, just one last time.”

  Louise hadn’t wanted to bury Alan. In the days after his death she’d begun making plans to have his body cremated and have the ashes scattered above a special place: the rocky cove visible from their back deck. When Louise died, the family decided to have both of them cremated and to have their ashes scattered together.

  On the afternoon of November 18, 1998, a handpicked crowd of Alan and Louise’s closest friends stood on the seventeenth green of Pebble Beach’s Cypress Point course. The helicopters seemed to explode from thin air, fluttering from over the hills, over the house on Bonaficio Drive, and out over the water. The two craft stopped suddenly above a rocky inlet called Still-water Cove and turned slowly toward each other as ropes snaked out from their bellies. Tied to the end of each rope was an urn— one carried Alan’s ashes and some dried flowers, the other Louise’s ashes and dried flowers.