The Astronaut Wives Club: A True Story

by Lily Koppel

Hachette Books

The Space Race heroes had the right stuff for space travel, but the wrong stuff for happy and lasting marriages.

They were America’s Cold War heroes, daring golden boys who went where no man had gone before, capturing the country’s hearts and minds (and many willing other women) in the process. But back on Earth, their wives were left to suffer in silence with only the glare of the international spotlight — a kind of celebrity only known to very few in this world— and the help of booze and pills to stay sane.

“I think we look like Stepford Wives, don’t you?” asked Jane Dreyfus, the ex-wife of Pete Conrad, Apollo 12 astronaut who became the third man to walk on the moon. “Because we all tried to be so calm and so cool and everything, but we were a far cry from Stepford Wives.”

Out of the 30 astro-marriages— spanning from the first American launched into space in 1961 to the moon landing in 1969 — only seven couples would stay married.

But thanks to a new book “The Astronaut Wives Club” by journalist Lily Koppel, we now know that these wives also had each other in the form of an unofficial women’s group. To the outside world, they were perfectly coiffed, apple pie baking housewives. But with their sisters — the AWC — they allowed their armor to fall, the tears to drop, and the truth to come out.

Russia had been dominating space since the launch of Sputnik in 1957. America was playing catch-up. NASA’s men represented the symbolic conquest over communism. Over the next decade, NASA would run three programs: Project Mercury, which launched the first American into space; Gemini, notable for the first American space walk; and finally the Apollo program, which landed a man on the moon.

America’s space age officially began on April 9, 1959, when the Mercury Seven were announced: Scott Carpenter, Gordo Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Alan Shepard, and Deke Slayton. The fame was instantaneous for both astronaut and wife.

During the group’s first public appearance together, one of the first questions asked was: “What do your wives think?”

The astronaut wives were inundated by reporters and TV crews, who camped out at all hours at their homes, angling for a shot of the special spouses.

Any “scandal” was swept under the rug — and the women had to be as perfect (if not more so) than the men. Deke’s wife Marge had to hide the fact that she was a divorcee from the press. And Trudy Cooper remained mum about the time she left her husband Gordo after she had discovered he was “screwing another man’s wife,” as rumor had it. Instead, she took him back for the sake of his NASA career.

Unprepared for the limelight, these women, mostly military wives accustomed to subsisting on meager salaries and living invisible, ordinary lives became overnight celebrities. Not only did they grapple with the looming fear of their husbands’ deaths, but also “some of their famous husbands just couldn’t manage to keep their pants zipped.”

While the wives stayed in Texas, the astronauts misbehaved in Florida’s Cape Canaveral, which became an “off-limits playground” filled with astro-groupies that they nicknamed “Cape Cookies.” Groupies took the form of stewardesses, hotel clerks, and waitresses and seemed to “magically appear” wherever the astronauts did. At one point, two women even “dropped to their knees as the group entered, prostrating themselves before the astronauts.”

Betty, wife of Gus Grissom, one of the original Mercury Seven who died during a pre-launch Apollo 1 mission, once received a threatening letter from an unknown woman that read, “How can a good fellow like you with two charming children have a no-good, two-timing wife?”

When Betty confronted her husband about the letter, he denied any infidelity. But she asked about the other men, he stayed silent, as all the men did.

But the rumors got out anyway. The worst offenders were believed to be Alan Shepard (the first American sent into space), Pete Conrad (the third man to walk on the Moon), and Dick Gordon (the pilot of Apollo 12) who were called the “Go-Go Crew” for their hard-partying ways. The three drove around in matching gold Corvettes, wearing gold aviators and blue flight suits.

Shepard was spotted as “swinging partes” and golf tournaments with “multiple women hanging off his arm.” Photographers even caught Shepard smuggling a prostitute into his hotel room, but the pictures were never published.

Members of the Astronaut Wives Club called Shepard’s spouse “Saint Louise” because in the face of all these travesties (all of which she had heard about through the grapevine), she remained “serene” and “ladylike,” as a perfect astro-wife should. Whenever told about Shepard’s behavior, she responded with, “I’m the one he really loves.”

Ironically, the two were one of the few couples to remain married. After 50 years together, they died — only five weeks apart — in 1988. Even their ashes were scattered together.

But not everyone was as “collected” as Saint Louise. To battle the stress, many of the women began self-medicating.

Gin and tonics, bourbon nightcaps, and endless cigarettes — ways to distract the mind and “turn off” anxieties—became dangerous excesses to many of the women, including Susan, wife of Frank Borman, the commander of Apollo 8, the first mission to fly around the Moon. Susan’s drinking got so out of control that she had to check herself into rehab. The two are still married.

Tranquilizers, too, were handed out “like lifesavers.”

“Yes, some of us did ask our doctors for a tranquilizer for a limited time, just to handle all the barrage of reporters and the neighbor’s predictions that there would be accidents. It was nerve-wracking and I don’t mind admitting we needed a little help now and then,” Jane Conrad told author Lily Koppel.

Divorces soon followed.

The first space divorce designation belongs to Harriet and Donn Eisele, the command pilot of Apollo 7. Harriet had long suspected that her husband had another woman — but her unease was confirmed by the fact that Donn hardly ever visited their sick 6-year-old son, who had previously been diagnosed with Down’s syndrome and then later, and fatally, leukemia.

When she questioned him, he brushed her off, calling her “crazy.”

“If I’m crazy, I should see a psychiatrist,” she retorted.

“You can’t see a psychiatrist. I’ll lose my job,” he said, according to the book.

Not soon after, Donn confided all: He had been seeing someone, a girl named Susie. They divorced, and he married Susie, but was fired from NASA anyway. Meanwhile, Harriet returned to work as a nurse, and got her masters in family therapy.

The first divorce only “opened the flood gates.”

Other Susies emerged. John Young, of the Apollo missions, left his wife for a Susy. And then Mercury Seven’s Gordo Cooper married a Susie after long-suffering Trudy left him for good.

Rene Carpenter, who once gushed about her husband Scott, one of the Mercury Seven that “a husband — a man — is a rare, wonderful creature, a pleasure to wait and love,” divorced him in 1972. She went on to establish a superstar career in newspapers and television, and became heralded as a vocal feminist.

Marge Slayton filed for divorce (now her second) with Deke after “the lying, the cheating, and the feeling that her husband had abandoned their home for that ‘harlot of a town,’ the Cape.”

Cheating wasn’t always the final straw. In some cases, the men came back from space altered by the experience.

Astronaut Ed White, who later died in a prelaunch accident, pushed himself out of the spacecraft and into the void above Earth. When he was pulled back in, he confessed that it was “the saddest moment of my life.”

“They have something, a sort of wild look, I would say, as if they had fallen in love with a mystery up there,” explained a nurse who treated the men after they returned from space, “as if they regret having come back to us…a rage at having to come back to Earth.”

The wives were often the objects of this new-found space rage.

“Who could ever compete with the Moon?” asked Faye Stafford, ex-wife of astronaut Tom Stafford, commander of Apollo 10. “I was lucky if I could come in second.”

Joan Aldrin, ex-wife of moonwalker Buzz, watched in horror as her already “heartbreakingly cold” husband slid further and further into alcohol and depression following his return home.

“I was always alone,” Joan said. “Men don’t chatter as women do, and Buzz is not a man who talks a lot. I am a talker, and I am very direct. It was hard for me, not to have him there to talk to.”

The women left behind were different, too.

Pat White, wife of Ed White, could never get over her husband’s passing. The weekend before the 1991 reunion of the Astronaut’s Wives Club, Pat committed suicide. The wives viewed her as the final fatality of the NASA’s space program.

If not for the AWC, many more women might have followed Pat’s sad fate. Dotty Duke admits that she almost committed suicide when her husband Charlie was dispatched in an Apollo mission. The only thing that saved her was the AWC.

The bond is so strong — a “lifetime membership,” one said — that, unlike the men, the women still meet for informal meetings. As a token of their bond, the keep golden whistles charms as reminders to “keep in touch and call whenever help is needed,” Koppel writes.

The memories of meals brought in Tupperware containers while the men were away; tears over coffee and cigarettes; champagne popped open during safe landings, this is what remains.

At one recent reunion near the wives joined in to sing a song about the club. During the chorus, the women joined in: “I won’t be here to steal your thunder/You can be a macho man on your own/Oh, you can be right about the universe/You can be right on your own!”

scahalan@nypost.com