Tom Wolfe - The Right Stuff

He kept the grave look on his face for a moment. And then he smiled. There were no catches and no angles. He was obviously sincere. He thought they were terrific and felt tickled pink to be involved with them at all. He couldn't do enough for them. And that was the way it went with Leo DeOrsey from that evening onward. He couldn't have been straighter or more generous.

DeOrsey proposed that the book and magazine rights to their personal stories be put up for sale to the highest bidder. Bonney was sure the President and NASA would allow it, because several military men had made such an arrangement since the Second World War, most notably Eisenhower himself. The selling point for NASA would be that if the seven of them sold exclusive rights to one organization, then they would have a natural shield against the endless requests and intrusions by the rest of the press and would be better able to concentrate on their training.

Sure enough, NASA approved the idea, the White House approved it, and DeOrsey started getting in touch with magazines, setting $500,000 as the floor for bids. The one solid offer—$500,000—came from Life , and DeOrsey closed the deal. Life had an excellent precedent for the decision. Few people remembered, but The New York Times had bought the rights to Charles Lindbergh's personal story before his famous transatlantic flight in 1927. It worked out splendidly for both parties. Having bought an exclusive, the Times devoted its first five pages to Lindbergh the day after his flight and the first sixteen the day after he returned from Paris, and all other major newspapers tried their best to keep up. In return for Life's exclusive rights to their personal stories and their wives', the astronauts would share the $500,000 evenly; the sum amounted to just under $24,000 a year for each man over the three years Project Mercury was scheduled to run, about $70,000 in all.

For junior officers with wives and children, used to struggling along on $5,500 to $8,000 a year in base pay, plus another $2,000 in housing and subsistence allowances and perhaps $1,750 in extra flight pay, the sum was barely even imaginable at first. It wasn't real. They wouldn't see any of it for months, in any case… Nevertheless, the goodies were the goodies . A career military officer denied himself and his family many things… with the understanding that when the goodies came along, they would be accepted and shared. It was part of the unwritten contract. The Life deal even provided them with foolproof protection against the possibility that their personal stories might become all-too-personal. Although written by Life , the stories would appear in the first person under their own by-lines… "by Gus Grissom"… "by Betty Grissom"… and they would have the right to eliminate any material they objected to. NASA, moreover, would have the same right. So there was nothing to keep the boys from continuing to come across as what they had looked like at the first press conference: seven patriotic God-fearing small-town Protestant family men with excellent backing on the home front.

Here in the summer of 1959 that was fine with Life and with the rest of the press, for that matter. Americans seemed to be deriving profound satisfaction from the fact that the astronauts turned the conventional notions of Glamour upside down. It was assumed—and the Genteel Beast kept underlining the point—that the seven astronauts were the greatest pilots and bravest men in America precisely because of the wholesome circumstances of their backgrounds: small towns, Protestant values, strong families, the simple life. Henry Luce, Life's founder and boss of bosses, had not played a major role, other than parting with the money, in making the astronaut deal, but eventually he came to look upon them as his boys . Luce was a great Presbyterian, and the Mercury astronauts looked like seven incarnations of Presbyterianism. This was no rural-American miracle, however. It was John Glenn who had set the moral tone of the Astronaut at the first press conference. The others had diplomatically kept their mouths shut ever since. From the Luces and Restons on down, the Press, that ever-seemly Victorian Gent, saw the astronauts as seven slices of the same pie, and it was mom's pie, John Glenn's mom's pie, from the sturdy villages of the American heartland. The Gent thought he was looking at seven John Glenns.

Among the seven instant heroes John Glenn's light shone brightest. Probably the least conspicuous, using that same measure, was Gordon Cooper. Cooper was a thin, apparently guileless soul, handsome in a down-home manner. He was from Shawnee, Oklahoma. He had a real Oklahoma drawl. He was also the youngest of the seven, being thirty-two years old. He had never flown in combat, nor had his test work at Edwards been of the sort that attracted much notice. Scott Carpenter was no further up the great ziggurat of flying, of course, but Carpenter was not at all reluctant to talk about his own relative lack of experience in jets, and so on. What seemed to annoy some of the boys was that none of the foregoing, obvious as it surely was, fazed Gordon Cooper in the slightest.

Two people who sometimes seemed to get impatient with Cooper were his Air Force comrades Gus Grissom and Deke Slayton. Grissom and Slayton had become great pals practically from the day they were selected as astronauts. They were from out of the same grim clay. Slayton was raised on a farm in western Wisconsin, up near the town of Sparta and the Elroy Sparta State Park Trail. He was taller than Grissom, more rugged, rather handsome, in fact, and quite intelligent, once you penetrated the tundra. When the subject was flying, his expression lit up, and he radiated confidence and had all the wit and charm and insights you could ask for. In other situations, however, he had Grissom's lack of patience for party manners and small talk and Grissom's way of lapsing into impenetrable blank stares, as if some grim wintertime north-country Lutheran cloud of Original Sin were passing in front of his face. Deke had started flying in the Second World War, when the Air Force was still part of the Army. In the Army one was continually around people who spoke Army Creole, a language in which there were about ten nouns, five verbs, and one adjective, or participle, or whatever it was called. There always seemed to be a couple of good buddies from Valdosta or Oilville or some place sitting around saying:

"I tol'im iffie tried to fuck me over, I was gonna kick'is fuckin' ass, iddnat right?"

"Fuckin' A."

"Soey kep'on fuckin' me over and I kicked 'is fuckin' ass in fo'im, iddnat right?"

"Fuckin' A."

"An' so now they tellin' me they gon' th'ow my fuckin' ass inna fuckin' stookade! You know what? They some kinda fuckin' me over!"

"Fuckin' A well tol', Bubba."

Now that Deke was all of a sudden a celebrity, there were people who knew him who cringed every time he got near a microphone. They were afraid he was going to Army Creole the nationwide TV and scorch the brains of half the people of the U.S.A. The truth was, Deke was far too sharp for that. He was okay in Gus's book. They lived just two doors away from each other at Langley, and if they were both at home on the weekend, they usually did something together, such as go hunting or wangle a T-33 from Langley Air Force Base and fly cross-country, taking turns at the controls. Sometimes they would fly all the way to California and back, and it was likely that if they exchanged a total of forty sentences, transcontinental, they would come back feeling like they'd had a hell of an animated conversation and a deep talk.

Just a couple of years ago, at Wright-Patterson, it was Gus and Gordo—as Gordon Cooper was known—who had been the great weekend flying buddies. Then Gordo had been transferred to Edwards, where Deke Slayton happened to be. And now that all three of them were in the same corps, this extraordinary new corps of astronauts, there were nights when the others would hear Cooper's Oklahoma drawl getting cranked up… and the gorge would rise… They would all be knocking back a few at somebody's house, some Saturday night, and they would hear Cooper starting to talk about something extraordinary that happened when he was testing the F-106B or whatever at Edwards… and the blood would come into somebody's baleful eyes, and he'd say, "I'll tell you what Gordo did at Edwards. He was in engineering ." The way engineering was pronounced, you would have thought Gordo had been a quartermaster or a drum major or a chaplain.