The Right Stuff

  Unfortunately, now came the part where they were just supposed to relax, eat a side of beef and a peck of kidney beans sinking in gravy, drink a little whiskey, and shake hands with the good folks and make themselves at home. So they led them back out onto the floor of the arena, cleared out a space, got some folding chairs for them and some paper plates loaded with huge joints of Texas steer, and then put a lineup of folding chairs around the whole group of them, in a circle, on the order of a stockade, and around the stockade they put a ring of Texas Rangers, facing outward, toward the crowd. The crowd was now lining up, by the hundreds, at the barbecue pits, getting great lubricated hunks of beef on paper plates … and more whiskey. Then they took seats in the stands, thousands of them, and looked down at the stockade floor. This was the main event, the reception, the Big Howdy: five thousand people, VIPs one and all, sitting up in the stands of the Houston Coliseum amid the burning cattle … watching the astronauts eat.

  Certain VIPs with clout, however, were allowed to enter the stockade through the ring of Rangers and greet the lads and their wives personally as they juggled the great maroon hunks of meat. It was always someone such as Herb Snout from Kar Kastle, and he would come up and say: “Hi, there! Herb Snout! Kar Kastle! Listen! We’re damned glad to have you folks here, just damned glad, goddamn it!” And then he would turn to one of the wives, whose hands were so full of cow meat she couldn’t budge, and he would bend down and turn on a huge Karo-syrup grin, to show his deference to the ladies, and say in a suddenly huge voice that would make the poor startled woman drop the reeking maroon all over her lap: “Hi, there, little lady! Just damned glad to see you, too!” And then he’d give a huge horrible wink that would practically implode his eye, and he’d say, “We’ve heard a lot of good things about you gals, a lot of good things”—all with this eye-wrenching wink.

  After a while, there were Herb Snouts and Gurney Frinks all over the place and the huge Hereford joints were sliding down every leg and splashing in the puddles of whiskey on the floor, and five thousand spectators watched their struggling jaws, and the smoke and the babble filled the air and the children screamed for mercy and relief. Just then, when the madness seemed to have outdone itself once and for all, a band struck up and the houselights dimmed and a spotlight searched out the stage and a show began and a mighty hearty voice boomed out over the p.a. system: “Ladies and gentlemen … in honor of our mighty special guests and mighty fine new neighbors, we are proud to present … Miss Sally Rand!”

  The band struck up “Sugar Blues” … much raunchy high-hatting of the trumpets … Oh, owwwwwwwww wahwahwah … and out into the spotlight pranced an ancient woman with yellow hair and a white mask of a face … Her flesh looked like the meat of a casaba melon in the winter … She carried some enormous plumed fans … She began her famous striptease act … Sally Rand! … who had been an aging but still famous stripper when the seven brave lads were in their teens, during the Depression … Oh-owwwwwwwww wahwahwah … and she winked and minced about and took off a little here and covered up a little there and shook her ancient haunches at the seven single-combat warriors. It was electrifying. It was quite beyond sex, show business, and either the sins or rigors of the flesh. It was two o’clock in the afternoon on the Fourth of July, and the cows burned on, and the whiskey roared goddamned glad to see you and the Venus de Houston shook her fanny in an utterly baffling blessing over it all.

  Just three years ago Rene had still been in that dogged military wife’s frame of mind in which you gladly spent three days sanding a slab of monkeypod, until your hands were raw, to save the fabulous sum of ninety-five dollars. When Scott had run up a fifty-dollar telephone bill calling her from Washington, Albuquerque, and Dayton during the testing back in 1959, it had seemed like the end of the world. Fifty dollars! That was the food budget for a month! That was three years ago. Now she was in the living room of her own house—custom-made, not a tract home—on a lake, underneath the live oak and the pines. She and Annie Glenn had flown down to Houston one weekend from Washington and picked out lots, just like that, but they turned out to be in the best spot in the vicinity of the Space Center, a development called Timber Cove. The Schirras and Grissoms had moved into the same neighborhood. With admirable foresight, as it turned out, they had built their houses so that they opened up in the back to look out on the water and the trees, while on the side facing the street they were practically blank walls of brick. They had barely moved the first stick of furniture in when the tour buses started arriving, plus the freelance tourists in cars. They were extraordinary, these people. Sometimes you could hear the loudspeaker inside the bus. You could hear the tour guide saying, “This is the home of Scott Carpenter, the second Mercury astronaut to fly in earth orbit in outer space.” Sometimes people would get out and grab handfuls of grass from your lawn. They’d get back on the bus with the miserable little green sprouts sticking out of their fingers. They believed in magic. Sometimes people would drive up, get out, stare at the house as if waiting for something to happen, and then walk up to the door and ring the bell and say: “We hate to bother you, but do you suppose you could send one of your children out so we could have our pictures taken with him?” And yet they weren’t like the fans of movie stars. There was no frenzy. They thought they were really being considerate by not asking you to come out for the snapshot session yourself. They really meant it. They had more of the attitude of being at a living shrine.

  This was the first house that Rene and Scott had ever built, the first house that had really seemed theirs. They had turned the page, all right. Things happened so fast now. At one point it looked as if they were going to be given houses completely furnished! The best that $60,000 could buy in 1962, at wholesale! A month after John Glenn’s flight, a Houston man named Frank Sharp presented to Leo DeOrsey, as the fellows’ business advisor, the following proposition: To show their pride in the astronauts and the new Manned Space Center, the builders, developers, furniture dealers, and others involved in the suburban home business would give each of the seven brave lads one of the homes being built for the 1962 Parade of Homes in Sharpstown. Sharpstown was a housing tract that Frank Sharp himself had been the impresario for. The Parade of Homes was a row of model houses that contractors who expected to do business in Sharpstown were putting up by way of advertising their wares. Sharp would contribute the land, a $10,000 lot to each astronaut; the contractors would contribute the houses; and the furniture and department stores would furnish them from top to bottom. The seven astronauts and their families would live right there on Rowan Drive in the Country Club Terrace section of Sharpstown, between Richmond Road and Bellaire Boulevard, in $60,000 worth of home and hearth each. Since Sharpstown at this point was nothing but maps, signs, bunting, Englishy thatchy tweedy-sounding street names and thousands of acres of wind-swept boondocker gumbo scrubland, Astronauts Row wouldn’t be a bad way to start filling in the spaces. Sharp was the Big Howdy through and through, a self-made man and already quite a prominent citizen, close to the mayor, Representative Albert Thomas, Governor John Connally, and Vice-President Lyndon Johnson. He underwrote annual golf trophies and things of that sort. He had the right credentials, or the Houston version thereof, and so DeOrsey had talked it over with the boys, and they all decided the deal was okay. It had nothing to do with the space program and didn’t obligate them to anything. It was just an unencumbered goodie, pure and simple. None of them actually wanted to live in Sharpstown, from what they had heard about the area. It was too far from the NASA facility, for a start. So they figured they would accept the houses, shake hands with one and all, and then … sell them. John Glenn was as agreeable to this type of goodie as anybody else. It was that age-old concern of the military officer with the extras. John had been in the Marines for nearly twenty years now. He was too far down that road, had been through too many measly paychecks, to decondition himself anytime soon when it came to the perks, the extras, the irresistible and perfectly honorable and authorized go
odies. Therefore, not even John, for all his quite sincere sense of morality, could comprehend the furor that was erupting. Gilruth and Webb and everybody else in the NASA hierarchy were blowing fuses over Frank Sharp’s Parade of the Homes of the Astronauts. And that was only the start. It had touched off a true emergency: the Life deal was under review! From what Scott and the others had picked up, the President himself was considering putting an end to all commercial exploitation of astronaut status. The rest of the press had resented the Life deal from the beginning and had argued that it cast a venal shadow on the astronauts’ patriotic service. Sharpstown showed you where the exploitation route could lead …

  Sharpstown was one thing … but a threat to the Life deal—now, there you had something serious! Unthinkable was the word. The seven pilots, steeped in the honorable goodies tradition of the military, had begun to look upon the Life deal in the same way they looked upon the military pension that you rated after twenty years. It was an immutable condition of the service! It was part of the drill! Regulation issue! Covered in the manual! All holes in the argument were immediately vulcanized by the heat of the emotion. This was no time to sit around waiting for the orders to be posted on the bulletin board. It was only three weeks before Scott’s flight, and he was in the thick of training, but on May 3 most of the others went to see Lyndon Johnson at his ranch in Texas to try to straighten the matter out. Webb was there, too. They had quite a conclave. Lyndon Johnson gave them some fatherly discourses on private lives and public responsibility, twisting his great hands around in the air in front of him, as if making imaginary snowballs. This pained him as much as it did them, and so on. The hell of it was that neither Johnson nor Webb would miss a minute’s sleep if the Life deal was canceled forthwith. They had both been burned by the astronaut-Life connection during the incident at the Glenns’ house in January. In fact, if it hadn’t been for Glenn—

  Fortunately, there was no getting around John. By now, three months after his flight, John had ascended to a status that only a biblical scholar could fully appreciate. John was the triumphant single-combat warrior. He had risked his life to challenge the mighty Soviet Integral on the high ground. Through his skill and courage he had neutralized the enemy’s advantage, and the tears of joy and gratitude and awe still flowed. In the Bible, first Book of Samuel, eighteenth chapter, it is written that after David slew Goliath and the Philistines fled in terror and the Israelites achieved a mighty victory, King Saul took David into the royal household and gave him the status of an adopted son. It is also written that wherever Saul and David went, people thronged the streets, and the women sang of the thousands Saul had slain and the tens of thousands David had slain. “And Saul was very wroth, and the saying displeased him; and he said, They have ascribed unto David ten thousands, and to me they have ascribed but thousands; and what can he have more but the kingdom? And Saul eyed David from that day forward.” And President Kennedy eyed John Glenn. The President had begun to regale John and bring him into the Kennedy family orbit. John was the sort of man a president needed to keep squarely within his camp. A vice-president, too, for that matter. Johnson had gone out of his way to be friendly to John and Annie, and they had genuinely begun to like the man. They wound up inviting Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird, for dinner at their house in Arlington, on John’s fortieth birthday. And the Johnsons accepted, just like that. Rene and Scott were also invited. “What on earth are you going to serve?” Rene said to Annie.

  “My ham loaf,” said Annie.

  “Ham loaf!”

  “Why not? Everybody likes it. I bet you Lady Bird asks for the recipe, too.”

  The Johnsons stayed until almost midnight. Lyndon had his coat off and his sleeves rolled up and was having a rare old time for himself. As they left, Rene heard Lady Bird ask Annie for the recipe for her ham loaf.

  One day John was out on the Atlantic Ocean, beyond the Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, harbor, aboard the President’s yacht, the Honey Fitz, when the subject of the Life contract came up. The President wanted to know what John thought of one particular argument against the Life arrangement that was frequently presented; namely, that a soldier in battle—a Marine at Iwo Jima, for example—ran just as great a risk of death as any astronaut and yet did not expect recompense from Time, Inc. John said yes, that was so, but suppose that soldier’s or Marine’s private life, his background, his house, his way of living, his wife, his children, his thoughts, his hopes, his dreams, became of such intense interest that the press camped on his doorstep and he had to live under glass, as it were. Then he should have the right to receive compensation. The President nodded sagaciously, and the Life contract was saved, right there on the Honey Fitz.

  Well, thanks to the Life deal, Scott and Rene could now get mortgage money and afford to build a new house in a nice area like Timber Cove. Or thanks to that and the panting eagerness of the developers to have astronauts in their new developments. It was the best advertisement they could have. They gave the boys close to at-cost deals on the land and the houses, and they let them have the mortgage money at 4 percent, with very little down payment. And for astronauts like John and Scott, who had now flown, they couldn’t do enough.

  The contractors and developers and the public generally thought Scott and his flight were terrific … but within NASA something … was going on. Scott and Rene had both begun to detect it, although no one ever said anything openly. Scott had gotten all the medals and all the parades and the trip to the White House, but something was up, and not even the other wives would tell Rene what it was.

  Scott had flown on May 24, three months after John. Deke Slayton had been scheduled to take the flight, but then NASA made it known that Deke had a medical problem: idiopathic atrial fibrillation. This was a condition in which the electrical firing sequence of the heart went out of sync occasionally, causing an irregular pulse and a slight lowering of the pumping capacity of the organ. Idiopathic meant that the causes were unknown. The condition had been discovered, said NASA, during centrifuge runs in August 1959. Slayton had been examined at the Philadelphia Navy Hospital and the Air Force’s School of Aviation Medicine at San Antonio, where the verdict—or so Slayton was told—was that the condition was a minor anomaly and not serious enough to cost him his job as astronaut. But, in fact, one of the Air Force doctors at San Antonio, a highly regarded cardiologist, had written a letter to Webb recommending that Slayton not be assigned to a flight, since atrial fibrillation, idiopathic or not, did reduce the efficiency of the heart to some degree.

  Webb just kept the letter on file. Slayton was assigned, in November 1961, to the second orbital flight. Early in January Webb ordered a complete reassessment of the man’s heart condition. His argument was that Slayton was an Air Force pilot on loan to NASA, and an Air Force cardiologist had recommended that he not be used for flights. Therefore, the case should be reviewed. Slayton’s case now went before two boards, one made up of high-ranking NASA doctors and the other made up of eight doctors convened by the Air Force Surgeon General. Both approved Slayton for the approaching Mercury flight. Nevertheless, Webb bucked the case up to three Washington cardiologists, including Eugene Braunwald of the National Institutes of Health, as a sort of blueribbon panel. He also requested an opinion from Paul Dudley White, who had become famous as Eisenhower’s cardiologist. Why this was happening so late in the game, three months after Deke had been assigned to the flight, no one could figure. All four doctors came to the same conclusion, apparently out of sheer common sense as much as anything else. Here was a case concerning a pilot with a minor heart defect. He could probably make a space flight or any other flight with no problems. Nevertheless, from the administrator on down, the entire space agency seemed to be agonizing and oscillating and spinning its wheels over the matter, which by now had accumulated a file as thick as your arm. So if Project Mercury had plenty of ready and willing astronauts with no cardiovascular anomalies at all, why not use one of them and have done with it? That was it, so far as
Webb was concerned. It was now the middle of March. Two months ago, in his set-to with Glenn, James E. Webb had run up against astropower and had lost. This time he had his way. Slayton was off the flight.

  The great Victorian Animal was utterly baffled. The Animal had been dutifully cranking out human-interest stories about Slayton. How could NASA decide now that he was a washout with a bad heart? There was no … proper emotion … for the event.

  According to the official NASA wording, Slayton was “keenly disappointed” about the decision. That was putting it somewhat delicately. The man was furious. Slayton tried to keep a rein on himself in public statements, however, because he didn’t want to jeopardize his chances of reinstatement. He was convinced that the whole thing had somehow been blown up into a specious issue and that they would all come to their senses by and by. Privately he was tying knots in the flagpole. He kept saying that Paul Dudley White had made an operational decision. His argument was that White and the other doctors had first delivered their medical opinion—he was fit to fly—and then they had delivered their operational opinion, which was: “Even so, why not choose somebody else?” They were entitled to their medical opinion; period. But they had made an operational decision! This word, operational, was a holy word to Slayton. He was the King of Operational. Operational referred to action, the real thing, piloting, the right stuff. Medical referred to one of the many accessories to the business at hand. You didn’t call in doctors to make an operational decision. The Life reporters knew very well how angry Slayton was, and other reporters had strong hints of it. But the Genteel Beast could find no appropriate … tone … for it. So after a short time they just dropped it. They stuck with the NASA version: “Keenly disappointed.” Few of them realized that it went beyond anger. Deke Slayton was crushed. He had not merely lost his ride on the next flight; he had lost everything. NASA had just announced that he no longer had … the right stuff. It could blow at any seam!—and his had blown. Idiopathic atrial fibrillation—it didn’t matter! Any seam! His whole career, his ascension from the dour grim tundra of Wisconsin was based upon his indisputable possession of that righteous stuff. That was the most important thing he had ever possessed in this Trough of Mortal Error, and it was plenty. It was the ultimate. And it had blown, just like that! He felt humiliated. This thing would now be rubbed in his face everywhere he turned. He couldn’t go back to Edwards now, even if he wanted to. The Air Force was not going to use a NASA reject for major flight test work. Flight test? Hell, he couldn’t even fly a fighter plane by himself anymore! It was true. He could go up only in two-seaters with another pilot—someone who was still intact, with no ruptured seams from which his vital stuff had leaked. There was even the possibility that the Air Force might ground him altogether, notwithstanding the fact that the Surgeon General’s board had pronounced him “fully qualified as an Air Force pilot and as an astronaut.” Air Force pride was at stake. The Air Force’s Chief of Staff himself, General Curtis LeMay, was taking the position that if he wasn’t qualified to fly for NASA, how could he be qualified to fly for the Air Force? All this was being said about him, Deke Slayton, who had fought hardest of all to have the astronaut be treated as a pilot, even to the extent of insisting on airplane-style controls for the capsule, or, rather, damn it, spacecraft.