The Right Stuff

  Scott was a lieutenant, which meant that his pay, including subsistence and housing allowance, was only about $7,200 a year, plus some extra flight pay. Young officers and their wives realized from the outset, of course, that abysmal pay was one of the realities of a service career. There were other forms of compensation: the opportunity to fly, which Scott loved; the status of a Naval officer; the community of the squadron (when one was in the mood for it); a certain sense of mission (if you were feeling good about yourself) that civilians lacked—extras, such as flight pay and a housing allowance, and the goodies. Given the dreadfully low pay, the goodies, which were usually trivial by ordinary standards, tended to take on an overblown importance. That was why so many young military couples in the late 1950’s had living rooms dominated, ruled, oppressed, enslaved by the most bizarre furniture imaginable: Chinese k’ang tables with entire village scenes carved into the tops of them in deep relief, squads of high-backed Turkish chairs that could have swallowed a ballroom, Korean divans with wood frames so ornately inlaid with mother-of-pearl that the entire room seemed to be grinning hideously, Spanish armoires so gross, so gloomy, so overbearing that the mere sight of them brought conversation to a halt … and the flamboyant monkeypod. For one of the goodies was the opportunity to buy hand-carved wooden furniture cheaply when you were assigned to the far ends of the earth. That was your opportunity to furnish the living room at last!—and the military would ship it back to the States free of charge. Of course, your choice was limited by the local taste. In Korea you settled for mother-of-pearl or Chinese baroque. And in Hawaii, where Scott and Rene had been assigned, there was always the monkeypod.

  In a department store in Hawaii a first-rate finished monkeypod coffee table cost about $150. A modest sum, one might say; but if your base pay was only $7,200 a year, that meant you had only forty-eight such sums to last you for an entire year. And Scott and Rene had four children! But unfinished slabs of this amazing wood with its flaming yellow grain were available for as little as nine dollars. If you were willing to spend twenty-four hours sanding, rubbing, oiling, and polishing them, and another ten or twenty constructing legs or frames, you could save $140. Fortunately, Rene had a good sense of design and was even able to use the monkeypod with finesse—a rare accomplishment in the Monkeypod Life.

  Both Scott and Rene had been brought up in Boulder, Colorado. Scott was top drawer by Boulder social standards, such as they were. He was descended from the first white settlers in the state. His mother’s father, Victor Noxon, owned and edited a newspaper, the Boulder Miner-Journal. Scott’s parents had separated when he was only three, and his mother contracted tuberculosis and was confined to a sanitarium for long stretches, so that Scott lived in Victor Noxon’s house and was, as it turned out, raised by him. Rene met Scott at the University of Colorado and dropped out in her sophomore year to marry him. They spent practically that entire first year on the ski slopes. They were an extraordinarily good-looking couple, both blond, trim, athletic, high-spirited, outgoing, the sort of couple you seldom actually saw outside the Lucky Strike ads. Many wives of fighter pilots would end up looking on helplessly as their husbands grew more and more distant, a fact they would acknowledge in what were meant as lighthearted remarks, such as: “I’m only his mistress—he’s married to an airplane.” Often she would be overstating their intimacy; the actual mistress would be someone she didn’t know about. Scott, on the contrary, was completely devoted to Rene and their two sons and two daughters. Many nights, during the testing for Project Mercury, Scott wrote Rene long letters, some of them ten or fifteen pages, rather than run up more telephone bills. He kept trying to reassure her that he wasn’t getting involved in anything reckless. One night he wrote: “Most of all, don’t worry. You know what is uppermost in my mind and that I wouldn’t needlessly jeopardize what we have together.” He was determined, he said, to live long enough “to make love to you as a grandmother.”

  All along, his feelings on this score had been so profound that he had done an extraordinary thing eight years before. After finishing his basic flight training at Pensacola and his advanced training at Corpus Christi, he had voluntarily chosen to fly multi-engine PBY–4 patrol planes rather than fighter planes. He didn’t even like PBY–4s. He could barely stand to fly them. Who could? They were big slow awkward trucks. Yet he had stepped down off the great ziggurat pyramid here at the first major plateau. If the subject ever came up, he would say: “I did it out of allegiance to my family,” meaning that patrol planes didn’t leave as many widows behind. The Korean War was just beginning, and Scott ended up flying P2V patrol planes up and down the Pacific mainland. Naturally this was completely outside the big league for Navy pilots in the war. Any truly righteous aviator wanted to be assigned, on loan, to an Air Force fighter squadron for aerial combat over North Korea. But reconnaissance had its own hazards and trials, and Scott was considered extremely proficient at it; so much so that after the war he was brought to Patuxent River and trained as a test pilot.

  Nevertheless, Scott had forsaken the righteous competition. Of his own accord! Out of allegiance to his family! Perhaps it had to do with his memories of how his own family had been disrupted during his early childhood. Well, that was something for psychiatrists to speculate about, and no doubt they were doing so. In his first psychiatric interview at Wright-Patterson, Scott himself had opened the session. He asked the first question. He said to the man: “How many children do you have? I have four.”

  Scott was surprised when he found himself among the thirty-two finalists in the competition for astronaut. He had bowed out of the big-league competition long ago. He had only two hundred hours of flying time in jets; and most of that he had accumulated in the course of flight test training. The other candidates all seemed to have fifteen hundred to twenty-five hundred. Yet here he was. Not only that, as the days had gone by, first at Lovelace and now at Wright-Pat, his prospects had begun to look promising. It was amazing.

  One thing Scott had going for him was his superb physical condition, although at the outset he would have never believed that sheer physical condition could be of any vital importance. He had been a gymnast at the University of Colorado and had terrific shoulders with the deltoid muscles bulging out in high relief, a thick strong neck, an absolutely lean and perfectly formed chest, like a South Sea pearl diver’s—and, in fact, he had done a great deal of scuba diving—and his torso tapered down like Captain America’s in the comic strip. Others complained the whole time, but the tests at Lovelace and Wright-Patterson didn’t bother Scott in the slightest. Each one was a moment of triumph for him.

  One night Scott called, and Rene could tell that he was exceptionally pleased over how things were going. It seemed that there was a test of lung capacity. The candidate sat at a table and blew into a tube. The tube led into an instrument with a column of mercury. The idea was to see how long you could hold the column of mercury up to a designated level with the pressure of your breath. The record, they were informed, was ninety-one seconds. Scott—as he excitedly told Rene that night—knew from years of undersea swimming that after your lungs feel completely out of air and every signal in your central nervous system predicts disaster if you hold your breath an instant longer, you actually have a substantial reserve supply of oxygen in your system. It is the buildup of carbon dioxide in the lungs, not the absolute depletion of oxygen, that signals the emergency. Scott forced himself to hold his breath, through all the early signals, while he counted slowly to one hundred, with the idea of surpassing the mark of ninety-one seconds. He counted very slowly, as it turned out, and held the column of mercury up for 171 seconds, almost doubling the record.

  Another candidate in Scott’s group also broke the old record by holding the mercury up 150 seconds. He was a Marine pilot named John Glenn. Scott had known Glenn slightly when both were at Pax River during Scott’s flight test training. Glenn had set a cross-country speed record, Los Angeles to New York, of three hours and twenty-three minutes
in an F8U fighter plane in July 1957. The two of them had hit it off immediately at Wright-Pat, partly, perhaps, because they appeared to be the two pacesetters in the testing. Scott had broken five records in all, and Glenn was usually his runner-up. One day they overheard one of the doctors saying to another: “Let’s call Washington and tell them about these two guys.”

  Dr. Gladys J. Loring and the others were astounded by Scott’s performance, and not merely by such matters as his lung capacity, either; for many of the tests were not physical tests in the ordinary sense but, rather, tests of perseverance and one’s willingness to push oneself beyond the usual limits of human endurance.

  Scott Carpenter did not mind the note-taking of Dr. Gladys J. Loring in the slightest. Scribble away! Scott was in his element.

  Conrad was back home in North Town Creek, back at Pax River, when the letter from NASA arrived. He knew he had not played it very smoothly during the testing. He had compared notes with Wally Schirra, and it turned out that when Wally’s group had gone through Lovelace, they had been just as ticked off at the way the place was run as Conrad and his group had been. Wally had even led his own little rebellion when they wanted their goddamned stool samples. One afternoon they had told Wally and the boys to avoid all highly seasoned food that evening, because they wanted to take stool samples the next day. So the whole group headed off to the Mexican section of Albuquerque, and they had picked out the rankest-looking restaurant they could find and fired up their innards with every red-mad dish they had ever heard of and hosed it down with plenty of good cheap rank Mexican beer. The jalapeño peppers had even gotten into the act! One of the boys had discovered a bowl of jalapeño pepper sauce on the table, a fiery reddish-brown concoction, and had poured it into a Dixie cup and presented it to the lab technicians as if he had a ferocious case of diarrhea—and had laughed his head off when the first sultry cloud of jalapeño aroma nearly wiped them out. But that was as far as he went—the lab technician level. He let the good General Schwichtenberg remain reserved and serene. That was the way Wally himself would have done it. He always knew where the outside of the envelope was, even when it came to pranks.

  No, Conrad knew he had poked a few unfortunate holes in the old envelope … Still, he had spoken his mind before and it had never hurt him. His career in the Navy had gone up on a steady curve. He had never been left behind. So he opened the letter.

  From the very first line he knew the rest. The letter noted that he had been among the finalists in the selection process and said he was to be commended for that. Alas, it went on, he had not been one of the seven chosen for the assignment, but NASA and one & all were grateful to him for volunteering and so forth and so on.

  Well, there it was, your classic Dear John Letter. Even though in his detached moments he realized that he had perhaps screwed the pooch here and there, it was hard to believe. He had been left behind. This was something that had never happened to him in the nearly six years he had been moving up the great invisible ziggurat.

  A couple of days later he found out that Wally had made it. Wally was one of the seven. So was Alan Shepard, who had also been in that room at the Marriott.

  Well, what the hell. Wally himself had given them all a lot of pretty sound reasons why a man shouldn’t feel too goddamned unlucky if he didn’t get involved in this Rube Goldberg capsule business. It was probably all for the best. Project Mercury was a civilian enterprise and slightly wacky when you got right down to it. They hadn’t even chosen pilots, f’r chrissake. Jim Lovell had been ranked number one in Group 20 at Pax River, and he hadn’t been chosen, either. They had all been lab rats from beginning to end. It was a good thing someone had set the record straight …

  Still! It was incredible! He had been … left behind!

  Not too long afterward, Conrad was told that across the master sheet on top of his file at Wright-Patterson had been written: “Not suitable for long-duration flight.”

  V.

  In Single Combat

  They bubble, they boil, they steam and scream, they rumble, and then they boil some more in the most excited way. This sound of boiling voices was exactly like the sound an actor hears backstage before the curtain goes up on a play that everyone—tout le monde—must attend. Once there, everyone starts chattering away, out of the sheer excitement of being there at all, of being where things are happening, until everybody’s beaming face is boiling away with words and grins and laughs that burst out whether or not anything the least bit funny has been said.

  As he was not much of an actor, however, this was the sort of sound that terrified Gus Grissom. He was only moments away from the part he was likely to be worst at, and these people were all waiting on the other side of the curtain. At 2 p.m. the curtain was pulled back, and he had to walk onto the stage.

  A sheet of light hit Gus and the others, and the boiling voices dropped down to a rumble, or a buzz, and then you could make them out. There appeared to be hundreds of them, packed in shank to flank, sitting, standing, squatting. Some of them were up on a ladder that was propped against the wall under one of the huge lights. Some of them had cameras with the most protuberant lenses, and they had a way of squatting and crawling at the same time, like the hunkered-down beggars you saw all over the Far East. The lights were on for television crews. This building was the Dolley Madison House, at the northeast corner of Lafayette Square, just a few hundred yards from the White House. It had been converted into NASA’s Washington headquarters, and this room was the ballroom, which they used for press conferences, and it was not nearly big enough for all these people. The little beggar figures were crawling all over it.

  The NASA people steered Gus and the other six to seats at a long table on the stage. The table had a felt cloth over it. They put Gus in a seat at the middle of the table, and sticking up over the felt right in front of him was the needle nose of a miniature escape tower on top of a model of the Mercury capsule mounted on an Atlas rocket. The model was evidently propped up against the other side of the table so that the press could see it. A man from NASA named Walter Bonney got up, a man with a jolly-sounding voice, and he said: “Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention, please. The rules of this briefing are very simple. In about sixty seconds we will give you the announcement that you have all been waiting for: the names of the seven volunteers who will become the Mercury astronaut team. Following the distribution of the kit—and this will be done as speedily as possible—those of you who have p.m. deadline problems had better dash for your phones. We will have about a ten- or twelve-minute break during which the gentlemen will be available for picture taking.”

  Some men from over on the sides appeared and began handing out folders, and people were rushing up and grabbing these kits and bolting from the room. Bonney pointed to the seven of them sitting there at the table and said: “Gentlemen, these are the astronaut volunteers. Take your pictures as you will, gentlemen.”

  And now began a very odd business. Without another word, all these grim little crawling beggar figures began advancing toward them, elbowing and hipping one another out of the way, growling and muttering, but never looking at each other, since they had their cameras screwed into their eye sockets and remained concentrated on Gus and the six other pilots at the table in the most obsessive way, like a swarm of root weevils which, no matter how much energy they might expend in all directions trying to muscle one another out of the way, keep their craving beaks homed in on the juicy stuff that the whole swarm has sensed—until they were all over them, within inches of their faces in some cases, poking their mechanical beaks into everything but their belly buttons. Yet this by itself was not what made the moment so strange. It was something else on top of it. There was such frantic excitement—and their names had not even been mentioned! Yet it didn’t matter in the slightest! They didn’t care whether he was Gus Grissom or Joe Blow! They were ravenous for his picture all the same! They were crawling all over him and the other six as if they were creatures of tremendo
us value and excitement, real prizes.

  Ravenous they were!—these swarming photographers who could grunt but not speak, who crawled over them for a full fifteen minutes. Nevertheless, who was dying for the press conference to start? Anytime Gus had to tell total strangers how he felt about anything, it made him uncomfortable; and the thought of doing so publicly, in this room, in front of several hundred people, made him extremely uncomfortable. Gus came from the sort of background where, to put it mildly, glibness was not encouraged. Back in Mitchell, Indiana, his father had been a railroad worker. His mother used to take the family to the Church of Christ, a Protestant denomination that was so fundamentalist no musical instruments were allowed in the church, not even a piano. The human voice raising thanks to God was music enough. Not that Gus was much of a singer, either, however. His public incantations consisted mainly of Hoosier gus gruffisms. He was a short man with sloping shoulders, a compact build, black crew-cut hair, and black bushy eyebrows, a broad nose, and a face given to very dour looks. The only time Gus felt like talking was when he was with other pilots, particularly at beer call. Then he became another human being. His sleepy eyes lit up to about 200 watts. A crazy confident grin took over his mouth. He would start talking a streak and drinking a lake and, when the midnight madness struck, getting into his hot rod and sucking the surrounding countryside up his two exhaust pipes. Flying & Drinking and Drinking & Driving, of course. Gus was one of those young men, quite common in the United States, actually, who would fight you down to the last unbroken bone over an insult to the gray little town they came from or the grim little church they fidgeted in all those years—while at the same time, in some hidden corner of the soul, they prostrated themselves daily in thanksgiving to the things that had gotten them the hell out of there. In Gus’s case those things had been hot rods and, now, airplanes.