Sally Ride

by Lynn Sherr

  Something, or someone, whose every act was analyzed.

  When limousines transported them to the nearby Johnson Space Center for a reception, a NASA protocol officer handed Sally (and no one else on the crew) a bouquet of flowers. She took them. But en route to the makeshift stage on the steps of Building 1, Sally, who rarely carried anything, even a purse, gave them back and lined up with her crewmates. All the spouses were there, too, and each of the four wives held a red rose. Steve Hawley, Sally’s husband, recalls that he’d declined his flower, which left the couple free to link their arms around each other as Sally beamed and waved during the ten-minute ceremony. The crowd (mostly JSC colleagues) cheered. The crew cheered them back: this was the team that had helped make it happen. At the end of the festivities, the NASA guy, no doubt under orders, tried one more time to unload the flowers, but Sally politely gestured “no,” quickly engaging in conversation with Steve and George Abbey.

  The next day, Sally got slapped with Bouquet-gate. “No White Roses for a Crew Lady,” blared the headline in newspapers across the country. The first American woman in space, said the article, had “spurned a large bouquet of flowers after returning from her historic voyage… . [She] shook her head and turned her back [on the NASA man], leaving him standing with an armful of flowers. She had said before the six-day mission that she wanted to be treated no differently than her crewmates.”

  The alleged perpetrator was stunned.

  “That one little action—giving back the flowers—probably touched off more mail to me than anything I ever did or said as an astronaut,” Sally later wrote. “I received hundreds of letters, almost evenly divided in what they said. Half of those who wrote were incensed. ‘How could you be so rude and ungracious as to give back the flowers? That’s just like you feminists.’ The other half were thrilled. ‘Good for you! You let them know women don’t just want flowers.’ The truth was, I hadn’t been making a big statement one way or another. I just wanted my hands free.”

  Nothing was simple anymore.

  Eager to avoid a media stakeout at their house, Steve had booked a room at a local hotel. But as he checked in at the front desk (with Sally safely stowed in the car), he saw a reporter he knew and realized the press would be staying at the same hotel (“I mean, getting a reservation right outside the front gate probably wasn’t the smartest thing to do,” he admits). So he phoned fellow astronaut Dan Brandenstein, who lived nearby, and asked if they could spend the night. The Brandensteins happily took them in. Then, Steve recalls, “we got blasted in the media for not showing up at the house so that they could film us!”

  It wasn’t just the media.

  When Challenger was diverted from Florida to California, NASA decided to placate the VIPs stuck at the Kennedy Space Center—each of whom anticipated an introduction to America’s newest superstar—with another female astronaut from the Johnson Space Center. “Someone went through Building 4 and it wound up being me,” Kathy Sullivan says. She had smarted when Sally got the nod, but sportingly agreed to fill in that day. When she arrived at the Cape and faced several thousand people eager to bask in astronaut glory, she instantly understood that Sally’s precious experience was about to be hijacked. “And I was just really glad that she had a few hours to absorb it and make it her own, to just let it soak in with her crewmates. And I also thought, if this is what you get for going first, she can have it!”

  ON THE ROAD

  For the next few months of her official NASA tour—a rite of flight required by every astronaut since Alan Shepard—Sally carried the NASA flag across nearly as many borders as she’d overflown in the shuttle. At the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, a Plexiglas-helmeted Mickey Mouse gave her a kiss. In Sacramento, she was the star of Sally Ride Day, a home-state toast led by Governor George Deukmejian that attracted more crowds and security than had turned out for Queen Elizabeth II. In Las Vegas, when asked if she’d received any good commercial offers, she responded, “I wouldn’t trade this job for one million dollars.”

  Sally was hailed as a hero, a heroine, a Genuine American, the first Valley Girl in space (true) and the first Presbyterian in space (not true, and anyway, only a hereditary possibility).

  In New York, the crew received the keys to the city from Mayor Ed Koch, a perfectly legitimate event that I’d helped arrange through my friend the deputy mayor. It was the only way I could snag Sally and Steve for a low-key, weekend escape at our Long Island house, where she hung out in shorts and bare feet and enjoyed fresh clams and a James Bond movie. And where I had the distinct pleasure, over cocktails, of introducing her to Betty Friedan, whose pioneering push for women’s rights had helped make Sally’s ride possible. “Thank you,” the astronaut said to the feminist. Back in the city, Sally quickly dismissed the police officer assigned to protect her, and with Steve back in Houston, relied on my husband to body-block the crowds at a few events in her honor.

  She fully understood her assignment and carried out most of it without complaint. “A show of public support is critical for NASA to maintain its budget,” she later explained.

  In Washington, DC, home of the votes, she briefed members of the Congressional Space Caucus on the success of the robot arm (where Steve was introduced as “Mr. Sally Ride”), spoke at a National Press Club luncheon (where her male colleagues were “available to answer questions” ), and got a tee-shirt from Oregon senator Robert Packwood that read, “A Woman’s Place Is Now in Space.” Most of her activities included the other STS-7 astronauts, because whenever possible, she extended every invitation to them, too—in part to share the spotlight, in part to deflect it. “I tell people that Sally Ride made me famous,” John Fabian says, not ungratefully. Norm Thagard had reason to see it differently. During their tour of the Rayburn Office Building, a TV crew, eager to get a shot of Sally with the photogenic Crippen, and the others, shoved Thagard aside and mashed him against a wall, unaware (or, worse, unimpressed) that he, too, was a member of the crew. It wasn’t an isolated oversight. In Sally’s presence, everyone else disappeared. “She was a huge target,” Fabian says. “[I]n today’s political and terrorist environment, I think we would have reason to really be concerned about it. But fortunately, at the time all we had to worry about was Norm getting knocked into the wall.”

  At a reception for five hundred gushing admirers at the Air and Space Museum, Sally donated “something that was very close to me during the flight: my flight suit.” Then she and the crew showed their home movies. Sally’s charm and Crippen’s charisma captivated the local pols. At one table, Lynn Cheney, wife of then-Representative Dick Cheney, conferred with Republican lobbyist Nancy Reynolds, and told a reporter, “We’re just trying to decide which would make the better candidate, Crippen or Ride.”

  Sally and her crewmates attended a White House State Dinner, at which she was seated between President Reagan and the guest of honor, the emir of Bahrain. She discussed weightlessness with the latter (who wore a golden dagger in his waistband) and found him “very well informed on the subject.” She also told him she’d seen his island country clearly from the shuttle. Sally later said the president, with whom she had already dined once and spoken to on the telephone when he called to congratulate the crew at the landing, was “a very charming person.”

  She was very diplomatic. Her politics stood at least 180 degrees from those of Ronald Reagan, and she bristled at what she saw as an unusual level of White House interest in her appearances—too many command performances for someone who disliked being commanded to perform. Steve Hawley says Sally felt “used. She felt like she was being forced to do things that she didn’t believe in, and were for the benefit of causes and individuals she did not support. Because somebody at the White House wanted it, because somebody in the Reagan administration wanted it, or somebody at NASA Headquarters, or in Legislative Affairs, or because Senator so-and-so wanted it.”

  She was also disturbed by the politicization of her flight, as illustrated by the kerfuffle over Jane Fond
a. The movie star and her husband, Tom Hayden (who represented the district where Dale Ride taught, in the California Assembly), were among those invited to the STS-7 launch, and Fonda, like other famous women in attendance, was quoted prominently in the press. The next day, NASA Administrator James Beggs got a call from White House Deputy Chief of Staff Michael Deaver. “What the hell was Jane Fonda doing there?” Deaver asked. “Nancy Reagan is mad and I am mad and everybody is mad.” The controversy cost the NASA public information officer his job; he was reassigned to another, less glamorous, agency. Fonda responded to the flap by calling Sally “a true role model … able to rekindle the kind of spirit and enthusiasm that the space program had twenty years ago.” As for the objection to her presence by an administration not celebrated for its feminist policies, “Just because the White House has a ‘gender gap,’ ” Fonda said, “is no reason for NASA to have one too.”

  Sally made no comment. At the end of the White House dinner that July, she and Crippen presented the president with a small package of the favorite candy he’d given them—now enhanced by having flown on STS-7. “Far-out jelly beans,” Crippen explained to the tickled leader of the free world. Reagan replied that he’d “save them for the museum.”

  The silliness was part of the package. Among the mountain of requests Sally turned down—including parades, conventions, fundraisers, endorsements and endless requests from politicians either for themselves or their constituents—was the chance to sit for a portrait of herself in jellybeans. She also eschewed opportunities to dedicate a school in Fairbanks, Alaska, to have her cat photographed for a cat food calendar (she didn’t have a cat), and to give one man’s son a pep talk “to help him get motivated.” At its height, NASA tracked the calls for her appearances at twenty-three an hour.

  “Interest in space flight ebbs and flows, so you try to capitalize on it while it’s still fresh,” NASA spokesman John Lawrence said. But he added an important caveat: “We believe we should use the astronaut to promote an understanding of the space program, not an understanding of the individual astronaut.” It didn’t always work out that way.

  Sally had perfected the art of the interview to keep reporters focused on the mission, not herself. She had learned to repeat the question as part of her answer to maintain her concentration after the hundredth or so repetition. “Did you think at that moment, ‘Wow, I am making history’?” asked one interviewer. “You know,” Sally answered, “I thought at that moment, ‘Wow, I get to do this.’ ” Et cetera.

  And she had polished her speech to a fine shine, knowing when to pause for laughter or gasps or applause. Every telling sounded spontaneous. But she was only half kidding when, speaking to two thousand members of the American Bar Association in Atlanta, she told a questioner who asked if she was afraid to fly, “I was a lot more scared getting up to give this speech.” It was a familiar complaint. In 1962, Mercury 13 pilot Jerrie Cobb had admitted as much before testifying to that congressional subcommittee about letting women become astronauts. “I’m scared to death,” Cobb confessed to the chairman before the panel began. A representative from Illinois who overheard the conversation asked her, during the hearings, “How do you reconcile this emotional statement with the fact that an astronaut must be fearless and courageous and emotionally stable?” Cobb answered honestly, to appreciative laughter, “Going up into space couldn’t be near as frightening as sitting here.” More than twenty years later, Sally could confirm Cobb’s concern.

  Worse, the second the subject turned to herself, she grew anxious. The cocktail parties, the meet-and-greets, the autographs. And the creepy.

  “I remember going to a talk and some guy got up and said, ‘I’d like to make love to you!’ ” recalls a Westlake classmate. “What could she say? She was a NASA representative. How could she say, ‘Go to hell?’ ” At another event many years later, a woman walked up to Sally after a speech and said, arms outspread, “I collect hugs. Can I have a hug?” Sally stopped her short and said, politely, “Uh, no.” There were also stalkers, several, persistent and threatening enough to keep both JSC Security and the FBI on alert. At least one would later be escorted off campus by the University of San Diego police; another would fill her voice mail with shrill messages. The stalkers freaked Sally out. In time, she would stop answering her phone, guard her home address and wind up living in a house with a gate.

  “I think she was kind of traumatized by all of the public attention she had to go through,” Susan Okie tells me. Sally was “enough of an introvert that she had to force herself to do that day after day. That’s really the price that she had to pay.”

  It had happened to her predecessors, too: Charles Lindbergh, Neil Armstrong, and all the rest, whose noble deeds were trivialized by endless repetition and frivolous requests for quotes. The media can be very trying. Handling it was part of her job, and some of it made sense. But for a severely private person like Sally—who had to psych herself for every public appearance—the consequences were dire.

  At the height of her fame, she was losing her sense of herself. And the joy of her trip: “wanted to describe, but to friends,” she noted in a typically brief summary of events. “[S]poiled it (demystified, devalued, depersonalized) describing it to press.”

  Tam O’Shaughnessy says Sally talked about losing her equilibrium, about getting really shaky from the constant torrent. “I felt anxious and unsettled,” she told Tam. “I knew I needed help.” At some point, she consulted a psychologist. “And the person”—she never said who—“helped me figure out what to do.” The specifics of her therapy remain unknown, but in a lineup of bullet points on the pages of one slim memo book, Sally seems to have jotted down the lessons. She called the effort (“emotional, psychological”) required for all the public relations “draining,” and referred to her “Jekyll/Hyde” contrast: the “hermit side” of her character, eager to “avoid grps, avoid mtg people,” fighting the fact that she was “always watched.” She also indicated that like so many others seeking release, she felt better in New York City. Walking there, she observed, was “therapeutic”—the “freedom, exercise, anonymity, in the midst of crowds.”

  Unfortunately, that’s all she wrote.

  NASA, which wasn’t unsympathetic to Sally’s distress, asked Carolyn Huntoon to help filter out some of the less important requests and travel with her to some of the others. The two women had made a joke of Sally’s fame, and Huntoon jokingly addressed Sally as “AFWIS”—America’s First Woman In Space. That’s how Sally signed her notes back. “You’ll always be that,” Huntoon reassured her, “nothing will take it away.”

  Huntoon saw Sally’s anxiety firsthand when she had to convince her to attend the ceremony at a Texas school newly named in her honor. “I think she was embarrassed,” Huntoon recalls, “so she wasn’t going to go. But the center director got a call from a muckety-muck somewhere and called me. I called her.

  “What can I do to get you to go?” Huntoon asked.

  “If you’ll take me, I’ll go,” Sally responded.

  They made the trip. And as they walked up to the school, they heard a chorus of little voices singing the new school song:

  We are proud of our school, Sally K. Ride …

  We will always take a challenge and always do our best,

  We love to take that challenge at anything we choose,

  At Sally K. Ride, we’d rather win than lose.

  Sally turned red, then pulled herself together and said, “Okay, I can do this.” She was, Huntoon says, doing her duty. “I remember her telling me later that having me with her really made a difference. I hope so. But if she really didn’t want to do something, she wouldn’t do it.”

  Case in point: The Bob Hope Show.

  THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES

  NBC-TV was inviting viewers to “Blast Off with Bob” for his tribute to NASA: 25 Years of Reaching for the Stars. Alan Shepard had agreed to be a guest, along with Neil Armstrong, Bob Crippen and Guy Bluford. Shortly after
she returned from her flight, NASA asked Sally to join the cast. Never a fan of Hope’s politics or his use of showgirls as props, she declined. NASA tried again. She still said no; she didn’t want to do stupid skits. The folks at Headquarters in Washington asked Gerry Griffin, director of JSC in Houston, to intercede. “He’s promised to talk about her achievements,” they said of Hope. “Nothing funny where she’s involved. It will be a serious thing.”

  Griffin remembers sitting down with Sally at a beer bust one night and relaying the request. “And I could see her stiffen a little bit. And she looked at me and said, ‘No, I’m not going to do that.’ And I said, ‘Really? Why not?’ And she said, ‘Because I don’t like the way he exploits women.’ And I said, ‘Okay, but he is kind of a national icon and he wants to tell the story about you correctly.’ And she continued to look at me and said, ‘No, I’m not going to do that.’ She had a look on her face unlike anything I’d seen before, and I knew it was final. I knew I was at the end of my rope. I couldn’t order her to do it.”

  Sally’s protectors at JSC weren’t surprised. “She wasn’t going to be with Bob Hope, because he wanted good-looking babes hanging over him,” one comments. “The blondes with not a lot of clothes.”

  Bob Crippen remembers, with amusement, that Sally then disappeared. “We couldn’t find her. She got out of town. She was AWOL.”

  Steve didn’t know where she was either. On the one hand, he saw her side of things. “I supported her decision on the Bob Hope show. I think she’d had enough of what she could stand of having NASA tell her what she needed to do,” he says. “And I think she felt she was being used politically for things that were inconsistent with her politics.”

  On the other hand, he was annoyed. “I thought that her reaction was a little inappropriate—going AWOL and not telling anyone, in particular not telling me, and not taking responsibility for her decision,” he tells me. “Particularly given that she accepted the assignment with the knowledge—although probably not in detail—that this was going to happen. And it was almost like, now that she’s had her good deal, she doesn’t want to go through with her part of the bargain. That’s a little harsh, but some version of that. It was some time before she told me where she was. She’d gone to California.”