Tom Wolfe - The Right Stuff

Whether by design or not, Life had seized upon the idea that Luce's fellow Presbyterian John Glenn had put forth at the first press conference: "I don't think any of us could really go on with something like this if we didn't have pretty good backing at home." Pretty good backing? Perfect backing they were going to have: seven flawless cameo-faced dolls sitting in the family room with their pageboy bobs in place, ready to offer any and all aid to the brave lads. There was something crazy about it, but it was marvelous. The week before, in the September 14, 1959, issue, Life had ushered Gus and the other fellows out onto the Pope's balcony with a cover story headlined READY TO MAKE HISTORY that left no doubt whatsoever that these were the seven bravest men and the seven greatest pilots in American history, even if it was necessary to go easy on the details. Now Life was leading Betty and the other wives out onto that balcony.

Betty, for one, did not object to that at all.

They had to let the Life writers and photographers come into their houses and follow them around pretty much anywhere they wanted to, but that turned out to be no particular problem. Pretty soon they all realized they didn't even have to keep their guard up. The Life people were very sympathetic. The men among them obviously had a kind of male awe of Gus and the others; you could even detect a tinge of envy every now and then, because the Life reporters and the fellows were about the same age. But they were loyal. In any case, they were hamstrung, since Gus and Betty and the rest of the men and their wives had the right to censor anything that was going to appear under their names. And don't think they were bashful about it, either! Not for a minute! You'd hear one of the fellows on the telephone going over a manuscript with a Life writer line by line, telling him, in just so many words, what could stay in and what was coming out. Oh, the Life writers sometimes had their own notions of what was candid and colorful and "good copy." They liked to get on such subjects as the rivalries between the boys and such "colorful" matters as Driving & Drinking and the unspoken intrafraternal business of fear and courage… Well, the hell with that! It was not so much that the men wanted to come out sounding like the Hardy Boys in Outer Space—it was just that you'd have to be an idiot to let your personal story actually get personal. Every career military officer, and especially every junior officer, knew that when it came to publicity, there was only one way to play it: with a salute stapled to your forehead. To let yourself be turned into a personality , to become colorful , to be portrayed as an egotist or a rake-hell, was only asking for grief, as many people, including General George Patton, had learned. Scott Carpenter was a case in point. He was open and forthright by nature, and he happened to tell one of the Life writers how his teenage years had been anything but standard-issue astronaut-corps mom's-pie material, especially after his grandfather had died and he had drifted around Boulder raising hell when he felt like it—and some of this stuff came out in Life , without NASA being sent a draft of it, and Scott caught flak for weeks… on the grounds that he had put the program in a bad light.

As far as the wives were concerned, their outlook was the same as that of officers' wives generally, only more so. The main thing was not to say or do anything that reflected badly upon your husband. There wasn't much to worry about with Life on this score. If Betty or any of the others did happen to say anything wrong, she could always remove it before it saw print. As time went by, the Life writers must have despaired of getting any personal stuff at all into their personal stories.

Deke Slayton's wife, Marge, had been divorced, which was a matter of record, but that wasn't about to be printed in Life magazine. A once-divorced astronaut's wife was by now an unthinkable concatenation of words. When the selection process for astronaut had begun, Trudy Cooper, Gordon Cooper's wife, had been living by herself down at San Diego. The writers from Life may have known about it and they may not have. It was a moot point, because in any event there were not going to be any astronauts with washed-up marriages in the pages of Life magazine on the eve of the battle in the heavens with the Russians. The exclusive rights to the "personal stories" of the astronauts and their families that Life had purchased did not encompass any such tangled terrain as that.

And it didn't have to be that personal for them to wave the wand and make it disappear. Look at what they did with John Glenn's wife, Annie. Annie was a good-looking and highly capable woman, but she also had what was referred to as a "slight speech impediment" or "a hesitation in her speech." The truth was that she had a terrific stutter, the classic kind, the kind in which you get hung up on a syllable until you either force it out or run out of breath. Annie was game about it, and she would hang in there until she said what she wanted to say, but it was a real disability—everywhere except in Life magazine. In Life magazine there were going to be no ferocious stammering jackhammer stutters on the home front.

As for Betty, she came out in Life as the thoughtful, articulate, competent, much respected Honorable Mrs. Captain Astronaut. She didn't ask for much more than that. If it pleased them, the people at Life could sit around removing dour grim grit and zits until they earned a place beside the angels in Retouch Heaven.

Cape Canaveral was in Florida, but not any part of Florida you would write home about, except on one of those old Tichnor Brothers postcards on which there is a drawing of two grinning dogs positioned in front of a lamp post, each with a hind leg hoisted, and a caption that says:

THIS IS A WONDERFUL PLACE… JUST BETWEEN YOU AND ME AND THE LAMP POST! No, Cape Canaveral was not Miami Beach or Palm Beach or even Key West. Cape Canaveral was Cocoa Beach. That was the resort town at the Cape. Cocoa Beach was the resort town for all the Low Rent folk who couldn't afford the beach towns farther south. Cocoa Beach was so Low Rent that nothing on this earth could ever change it. The vacation houses at Cocoa Beach were little boxes with front porches or "verandas" nailed onto them and a 1952 De Soto coupe with Venetian bunds in the rear window rusting in the salt air out back by the septic tank.

Even the beach at Cocoa Beach was Low Rent. It was about three hundred feet wide at high tide and hard as a brick. It was so hard that the youth of postwar Florida used to go to the stock-car races at Daytona Beach, and then, their brains inflamed with dreams of racing glory, they would head for Cocoa Beach and drive their cars right out on that hardtack strand and race their gourds off, while the poor sods who were vacationing there gathered up their children and their Scotch-plaid picnic coolers, and ran for cover. At night some sort of prehistoric chiggers or fire ants—it was hard to say, since you could never see them—rose up from out of the sand and the palmetto grass and went for the ankles with a bite more vicious than a mink's. There was no such thing as "first-class accommodations" or "red-carpet treatment" in Cocoa Beach. The red carpet, had anyone ever tried to lay one down, would have been devoured in midair by the No See'um bugs, as they were called, before it ever touched the implacable hardcracker ground.

And that was one reason why the boys loved it! Even Glenn—even Glenn, who did not partake of all of its Low Rent glories.