Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman (25 page)

When the Korean War ended, the Navy cut costs by taking many planes off the carriers and leaving them ashore. It was cheaper to fly in and out of an airbase, so the
Oriskany
regularly parked on the shores of one of America’s World War II enemies, Japan. After that war the Navy had taken over the port town of Yokosuka, south of Tokyo, and turned it into a massive military base. Shepard and his pals spent much of their free time in that infamously seedy harbor town, one of the great havens of drunkenness and debauchery, a sailor’s dream port, a cheap and X-rated Disneyland.

It was familiar ground for Shepard, who had visited Yokosuka a decade earlier, in the dying days of World War II. But by 1954 a sprawling naval shipyard had grown around the harbor. It had a well-known officers’ club, the Clover Club, which was often full of attractive young “DACs”—Department of the Army, civilians. Beyond the shipyard, amid the wooden structures of the low hillsides, lay a town of hoods, hustlers, and whores.

For months, the all-male city of the
Oriskany
had been at sea, with no taste of romance except maybe a girlie magazine and a rare private moment in the showers. Young men bubbled into Yokosuka, an explosion of bar hopping and beer swilling. And if you happened to find a knowledgeable cab driver, he’d take you to the Green Eyes, Club Denen, the Casbah, and Mama-san’s. For an extra few yen, he’d take you further.

Yokosuka’s shopping district wasn’t the only place where things came cheap. Bargains were also found crowded along the dirt roads at the edges of town, in the “hotsy” bathhouses and geisha houses, neon-lit clubs like the White Hat, and the bordellos, where a kimono-clad girl would meet you out front and invite you inside. “Guys would go there like flies,”
one sailor recalled of his days on liberty at Yokosuka. “For a carton of cigarettes, you could be king.”

The
Oriskany
’s crew spent so much time in port that Captain Griffin worried that his men—especially Air Group 19— would all become infected with venereal disease. He threatened to call a “short-arm” inspection so that the ship’s doctor could check every man’s geisha-befriended penis. Jig Dog intervened, telling Griffin that if he forced his men to submit to such an inspection, he’d have to check Jig Dog’s “short arm,” too—and his own. Griffin called off the inspection.

In ports such as Yokosuka, the code among the brotherhood of naval aviators was to look the other way, don’t ask questions, and mind your business. How a man behaved in port was his affair. It had nothing to do with the family back home. It was, in some ways, part of the job—an entitlement after serving months on a ship full of men.

Shepard was no different. In fact, he enjoyed himself more than most of his peers in ports such as Yokosuka, downing cocktails, smoking cigarettes, and meeting women. Friends called him a “snake,” a “roué,” and a “liberty hound.” He’d stay out late, night after night, then get up and do three flawless hops in his Banshee. But few could recall seeing him drunk. When he and a group of pilots went out for the night, Shepard had no interest in chugging beers at the bar. He was a man with a plan, and the plan was to meet some attractive woman. Shepard’s Mangy Angels partner Mitch Mit
chell said Shepard, relying on some “inner sense,” could scope out a bar crowd and “pick out just the right one.” It might take one drink, it might take all night, but more often than not he’d walk out with her. “He never said a word, never bragged,” Mitchell said. “You never knew what happened. His lips would peel back from those big beautiful teeth and he’d just smile. Shep never revealed anything—where he went or who he screwed.”

Shepard was hardly an anomaly of the 1950s. Alfred Kinsey’s pioneering study
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
found that 80 percent of successful businessmen cheated on their wives. At the time, new icons of masculinity and sexuality were replacing old ones. The subtle charms of Cary Grant got swept aside by the raw sexual energies of Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Elvis Presley shaking his ass on TV. A young man named Hugh Hefner had begun publishing a magazine that, in addition to pictures of beautiful nude women, told men how to mix a cocktail, buy a sports car, have fun. Within three years, nearly a million men subscribed to
Playboy.

Men and women were breaking free all over America at the time. The Beat poets and comedian Lenny Bruce began breaking new ground with their words; women (helped by the pill) began expanding their own sexual boundaries. And men like Alan Shepard, who had watched their Depression-scarred fathers deny themselves and who had survived World War II and the Korean War with their optimism and virility intact, began to break free of the old cultural and moral restrictions, to convince themselves that forbidden pleasures were their due. It seemed to some peers that he simply couldn’t h
elp himself. When Shepard wasn’t flying, he was chasing.

“The other women in his life were significant,” said former academy roommate Bob Williams. “They were always there.”

Then again, some colleagues considered Shepard an otherwise devoted spouse. “I know it sounds contradictory, but I think Shep was a good husband,” said former academy classmate and test pilot Bill Botts, who attributed the philandering not to a bad marriage but “because he had more wild seeds in him than most people.”

Shepard’s duality gave some colleagues whiplash. He didn’t talk much about his wife and kids, and they’d be shocked to see him at family events, attentive and respectful with Louise, playful and fatherly with his two daughters.

And while some of Louise’s friends wondered why she stayed with him, she knew about and apparently
accepted what was happening. She may have pretended at times that Alan was different. But she wasn’t stupid—she knew. Still, they tried, really tried, to be a family. The deep and complicated truth was this: Alan loved Louise and she loved him. If his indulgences hurt her, she kept it to herself and created a selfless role as her husband’s anchor. Without her, he might have gone off in who knows what reckless directions. Louise grounded Alan. She was his tether to earth.

With his impressive performances in port, his Mangy Angels exploits, and his precision flying, Shepard became a celebrity aboard the USS
Oriskany.
He did calisthenics and sometimes jogged on the flight deck to keep fit. He could give an hour long lecture on the intricacies of some aircraft without any notes. One night, he took a Banshee up to fifty thousand feet and dove straight down toward the Philippines, intent on pushing the plane beyond Mach 1; he knew the Banshee wasn’t built for such speed, but he still managed to reach Mach .93, more than 600 miles an hour.

He was a natural and had what pilots call “situational awareness.” Like a basketball star who knows intuitively where everyone is on the court at all times, Shepard had a keen, bird’s eye sense of the space around him—where the other planes were, where the ship was, how fast and high he was flying, how much fuel he had left. Most pilots keep a “check-off list” on their knee, which is like a to-do list to remind them to put all the switches and handles in the right position. Shepard never used one, and once scoffed when he learned that Mitchell religiously used his. “You use a check-off l
ist?” he asked after a cross-country flight with Mitchell.

Shepard patiently shared his knowledge with eager, younger flyers but could cut someone to ribbons if he sensed incompetence. He hid his emotions and kept his distance from those who wanted to become friends, seeming not to need or
even want that kind of relationship. And yet, while he liked being alone, in a crowd he was graceful and swaggering and funny and smart.

He was the
Oriskany
’s own movie star, and when some real celebrities came aboard, his friends weren’t surprised to learn that Shepard had befriended a few of them. To avoid paying union wages to extras and stuntmen back home in Hollywood, Paramount Studios convinced the Navy to let it shoot a film aboard the
Oriskany,
where it would be freed from union restrictions.
The Bridges at Toko-Ri,
based on James Michener’s bestselling novel of the previous year, would become one of the more famous depictions of Korean War dogfights. It starred William Holden as an aging fighter pilot and Mickey Roo
ney as a daring young helicopter pilot.

Captain Griffin had some reservations about Rooney, who was known as a real wild man when he got drunk. But Griffin didn’t allow alcohol on his ship and felt sure that Rooney would behave in the absence of booze. A few days into the shooting, he even came to like Rooney, who performed for two and a half hours one night in the hangar bay, playing drums and telling jokes for the
Oriskany
’s crew. When the ship docked in Japan, though, and the crew went ashore, Rooney “got a few drinks under his belt and he was just a little stinker first class.”

During the filming, there was a lot of juggling of airplanes. The planes, flown by Navy aviators, waited on other nearby aircraft carriers until their cue from the movie’s director, Mark Rob-son. The planes would then approach and land on the
Oriskany,
with Robson’s cameras rolling. One of the pilots was one of Shepard’s former Naval Academy classmates, Bill Geiger. After landing and parking his plane, Geiger roamed around the ship until he found Shepard, and they made plans to meet that night in Shepard’s room.

When Geiger arrived in Shepard’s cramped, cluttered state-room, Shepard had a small cocktail party waiting. He’d set up a folding table covered with a tablecloth and put out som
e hors d’oeuvres—cheese, crackers, nuts—some paper plates and napkins, and, despite the captain’s no-alcohol-on-the-ship rule, a cocktail shaker. Shepard beamed with pride at his little unauthorized happy hour and mixed them each a martini—straight up, with olives. They were sipping their drinks when there was a loud knock on the door.

“Enter,” Shepard called, and in stumbled Mickey Rooney and another member of the cast. Rooney had clearly found another happy hour somewhere. He was bombed.

“Hey, Mickey,” Shepard said. “Come on in. Have a drink and meet my friend Bill Geiger.”

Geiger was speechless. He was both starstruck and disgusted by Rooney’s drunkenness, and he was amazed that Shepard was on a first-name basis with a movie star. Rooney stumbled over and offered Geiger a sweaty handshake. “Hey, fella,” he slurred. “Shake the hand that held the tit of Ava Gardner.”

Shepard’s love of cocktails never seemed to affect his flying or his nerves, however. That fact was never more clear than on the dark, cold morning of March 15, 1954, as Shepard’s squadron prepared for a simulated attack on the battleship USS
Iowa.
Jig Dog, with Shepard as his wing man, would lead a two-division group of eight Banshees and meet up with a dozen AD Skyraiders, propeller planes that would take off before the faster Banshees. Together they’d stage a coordinated mock attack.

The Skyraiders took off into the predawn blackness just as a heavy snow began falling. Jig Dog could barely find his Banshee on the stormy flight deck and was sure the mission would be canceled. Then he heard the call: “Man jets.” And soon after: “Start engines.” Even after he and Shepard launched and rose toward twenty-five thousand feet, he thought that at any moment the orders for a return to the ship would crackle into his headset. “I’d never been out in weather like that, before or after,” he r
ecalled. Once all eight Banshees were airborne, Jig Dog started climbing in an effort to get above the clouds. But in a matter of seconds “things began to unravel.” First his windshield froze over and he had to crank up the heat to full blast. Then it became unbearably hot. The heater had at least cleared a small opening in the ice, but it didn’t matter much because there was nothing to see but black sky filled with monsoons of snow. Jig Dog’s squadron kept flying, not by sight but by monitoring their instruments.