Moondust (34 page)

Women got a hard time from the space programme in all sorts of ways. Even as the Mercury wives struggled to adjust to their new lives in 1960, a woman pilot, Jerry Cobb, was being put through the same battery of tests that the men took at the Lovelace clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Cobb owned four altitude records and flew everything from trainers to four-engined bombers and passed the tests so impressively that she was asked to find some sister aviators to try out for the programme. Eventually, twelve more made it through the selection process – yet none would fly in space. The Soviets sent Valentina Tereshkova up in 1963, but NASA would wait until
1983 even to put a woman on the shuttle, and it would be 1995 before one flew the thing; 1999 before that same woman, Col. Eileen Collins, became the first female commander. Any way you look at it, it's a shocking record and the “Mercury 13” are now a cause célèbre in some sectors of the space community. There has even been a campaign to send Jerry Cobb up belatedly.

All of which leads us into even messier regions. In
Carrying the Fire,
Michael Collins confessed to relief that there were no women on his crew, because the privacy on those tiny craft was nonexistent. I was surprised to find this coming from so subtle a man as Collins, because it seemed to me that anyone capable of contemplating the myriad nasty ends available to an Apollo astronaut could probably learn to bare his arse in front of a lady without bursting into tears. But when I ask Duke, he says the same thing – that he thinks it was the lack of privacy that kept women off the crews – and I try hard to make myself remember that the Sixties hadn't happened for these people yet. Then we talk about the earthier aspects of Apollo life and even I find it hard to imagine men and women of his generation sharing these experiences.

It's mostly children who worry about toilet procedures in flight, but not exclusively so. According to the Lindbergh biographer A. Scott Berg, the first question King George V asked after that solo transatlantic flight in 1927 was “How did you pee?” (The answer involved sympathy for the Frenchmen who'd hoisted him onto their shoulders after thirty-three hours in the air.) Naturally, the astronauts had more sophisticated systems – we know that they made use of condoms which channelled their urine into receptacles on the early flights. The trouble was that if anything leaked, you ended up with little bobbling globules of piss reeking around your ears. This happened to Gordon Cooper on his Mercury flight and all he could do was herd them together every so often, so that he knew where they were. The rubbers on Apollo had the same problems, but were connected through a hose and valve directly to space. Not only was it easy to catch yourself in the mechanism, but opening the valve brought the hungry tug of absolute vacuum and at this point,
you understood that you were connected directly to the void, uniquely, as no human had ever been before, via your penis. This thought alone was enough to shrivel the steeliest resolve, leading to leakage and yet more piss reeking around the cabin, an additional hazard for which your fellow space lords would not thank you. There were compensations, mind: one of the best Gemini stories concerns Wally Schirra's beautiful photo of a “urine dump” at dawn, where the liquid ejected from the craft instantly atomizes and crystallizes, simulating a firework display in the sunlight.

Legend holds that a NASA astronomer found it among pictures of stars.

“Wally, what constellation is this?” he asked excitedly.

“Jocelyn,” came the deadpan reply, “that's the constellation Urion.”

But that was all pissing in the wind. Defecation was the real deal. To do this on Apollo, you had to climb to the lower right side of the craft while your crewmates moved as far away from you as they possibly could – which anyone who's seen one of the capsules will appreciate
wasn't far.
There, you got completely naked, removing rings, watches, everything, because you couldn't be sure what was going to happen next; then you positioned a special plastic bag as best you could, and
went,
hoping that everything went in it. Remember that you're floating; the bag is floating; your shit is floating. Charlie says: “Anything you can imagine happening … happened.” Thus there is the tale of a stool that went freelance on one flight, causing a panic that must have been something like the famous scene from
Caddyshack
where someone accidentally drops a chocolate bar in a holiday camp swimming pool. So unspeakable was the hour-long process of dumping and getting cleaned up afterwards that I heard rumours of one astronaut dosing himself with Imodium, which enabled him to hold it in for eight whole days. I'd rather suspected this to have been Alan (“anal” spelled sideways) Bean, but gossip finally suggested another candidate.

Anders was standing in line at an airport check-in desk when I called him on his mobile phone. He came clean straightaway.

“Haha – yeah,” he hollered above the background noise. “I
set the world's longest distance no-bowel-movement record … three-quarters of a million miles! Everything was looking a little brownish to me when I got home … ”

He went on to point out that you can verify this by watching the way he waddles across the carrier deck in the post-splashdown footage. Later, I notice the curious fact that when his crew addressed Congress shortly afterwards, he was the only person in the building wearing a brown suit, leading me to wonder whether his space “brown-out” left a permanent mark on his psyche. As Charlie says: “We had a lot of laughs with the old waste-management system.” None of which lets NASA off the hook about mixing genders on Apollo, because they could have sent an all-woman crew, but this was the 1960s: the times, they weren't a-changing. There weren't many girls in rock groups, either.

The obvious irony of this is that the Moon has tended to be identified with women down the ages, perhaps because her twenty-nine-and-a-half-day cycle roughly corresponds to a regular menstrual cycle. No one knows why this is: Darwin thought it might stem from our oceanic origins, from the fact that the highest tides occur at full and new Moons, making these the best time for reproduction. Either way, the word for “Moon” and “menstruation” is related or interchangeable in many languages and it's easy to see why some women might have felt unease at her symbolic assault by men (and precisely as feminism prepared to enter its most militant and influential phase). The colourful TV astrologer Sybil Leak, for instance, sided with Tom Stoppard in complaining of science “ripping the veil of mystique from the Moon” when Apollo went up; of her dignity being stripped away by Buzz and his pals tromping over her in their size thirteen boots. Polls consistently showed the space programme of the Sixties and Seventies to have far more support among men than among women.

Compensation comes from hoping that somewhere there is a parallel universe in which Rene Carpenter, the first of Mercury-flier Scott Carpenter's four wives, was the first Moonwalker. It's reputed that in 1966 Neil Simon based an entire play – the romantic/political comedy
Star Spangled Girl
– on a lively
exchange he witnessed between her and the
New York Post
columnist Paddy Chayefsky at a party in his house. She was bright and magnetic then, and it's clear that not much has changed when I catch up with her in Denver, where she treats me to a characteristically burlesque account of the early days of the programme: of the women's excitement at having a semipermanent place to live for the first time; of arriving in south Texas to find a nowhere of sagebrush and swamp, with no stores or supermarkets (or to begin with even
houses
) within an hour's drive; of supervising the building of their first homes having never owned property before and winding up with floods whenever it rained, or air-conditioning systems connected to fireplace chimneys, so that the units billowed smoke whenever a fire was lit; of the men soon spending all their time at the Cape, preparing in all probability to be blown to smithereens while NASA ran flight tests, including one with Ham the chimpanzee (who lucked out and returned safely). Rene remembers that part well.

“You know, I was on the beach with Jo Schirra for the last Atlas test firing,” she says, “and it blew up right in front of us! It was terrifying, but there was fatalism among the wives, a lot of gallows humour. You'd say ‘Oh, thank God the monkey wasn't in that one.'”

Carpenter speaks of the way their lives changed in Houston, how they suddenly had people camping outside their doors and tour buses turning up, and how they trained local kids to misdirect the gawpers somewhere else. Uniquely, she wrote her own stories for
Life,
which would then be edited by the reporter Loudon Wainwright – father of singer-songwriter Loudon III and grandfather of Rufus – whom she adored, sighing:

“Oh, he was a doll-baby, so sensitive … always crying.
Life
was the one thing I trusted, because you couldn't trust NASA.”

When Scott flew his one mission, she had to sneak herself and the children to a safe house at the Cape, telling the kids to keep their heads down in the back of the car as she passed the TV scouts posted at every junction to intercept her, because the wives' reaction was part of the story they wanted. Had they found her, they'd have asked the same coded questions, before the flight, about impending widowhood and afterwards expected
the same response to the avoidance of widowhood, which usually boiled down to “I'm proud, thrilled, happy.” Later, when
Apollo 12
splashed down, Sue Bean, Barbara Gordon and Jane Conrad mocked this ritual by appearing in identical dresses with bouffants you could hide a Saturn in, holding aloft three cards with these very words scrawled on them, but the little-lady act was a joke among the women long before that. One wife who was asked by a female reporter how she felt when her husband was up is said to have blinked and answered, “Honey, how do you feel when your husband is up?” at which the interview time was judged to be up. In
The Right Stuff,
Tom Wolfe recounts a skit Rene used to do with the other wives, in which she played the TV correspondent Nancy Whoever, interviewing Primly Stable, wife of the famous astronaut Squarely Stable, on the front lawn of her “trim, modest, suburban home.” It would end with Nancy observing that, obviously, with her man safely home, Primly's greatest prayer had already been answered, but wondering what her one other wish might be, to which Primly would reply, “Well, Nancy, I'd wish for an Electrolux vacuum cleaner with all the attachments …”

Some women struggled with the glare, but Rene loved it, loved the media work, the political engagement, visits to the White House and getting to know Jackie Kennedy well (“she was so warm, had such charisma”) and the bond formed with the other women – “all my sisters” – to whom she still feels close. “We were dead certain that we had to remain close,” she says. “We had to be above the competition that was going on among the men.”

Even so, life was different for the space sisters as the 1950s turned into the Sixties. Their social lives were still confined, with days organized around
teas,
and certain clothes to be worn at certain times of the day. Twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, they had to call at the house of superior officers' wives and leave little embossed cards in accordance with some nonsensical military tradition. Yet this maniacal attention to propriety wasn't confined to the forces: women's magazines were full of articles on whether toilet rolls should be placed on the holders with the trailing end
in
or
out,
and on the correct
way to pour and receive a cup of tea (“You remove your right glove and place it in your handbag so that the fingers just flop over the edge, then proceed …”). Still, it was a picnic next to Navy deployment. I ask whether she blames the programme for her split with Scott in 1967.

“No, no – it probably made it last longer,” she laughs. “You know, divorce was considered a terrible thing then. But over the course of the Sixties, all the veneer seemed to fall away from everything.”

After the breakup, Rene campaigned for Bobby Kennedy in the presidential primaries, until he was assassinated. She claims to have been with him when news came of Martin Luther King's murder a few months before, and in common with most of Bobby's heartbroken supporters, she stayed away from that year's notorious Democratic Convention in Chicago.

“I don't know whether Bobby would have made a good president or not,” she muses when I ask whether he might have done a better job than JFK. “It was very difficult for him because he was so shy – not like JFK, who was going to be a journalist and was surrounded by journalist pals and speechwriters … and Bobby could hold a grudge, but at the time he was more dedicated to civil rights than JFK was: he had a lot of black friends and was braver.”

Post-Bobby, she forged her own career in TV while raising the four children she'd had with Scott. She remarried in 1977. Asked whether it had been a wrench to leave NASA, she almost falls out of her chair, exclaiming. “Oh God, no! I could hardly wait to leave NASA!” Nevertheless, she says, they were wonderful times.

But not always. Valerie Anders has fond memories, too, but draws an exhausting picture of lugging babies around while she readied the elder of her five kids for school, sorted out and cleaned the house, mowed lawns and tended gardens, drove miles to get shopping and tried to look glamorous enough to represent the programme at functions in her husband's absence, when they couldn't afford babysitters and she had only one smart dress (the green one you'll find her wearing in all of the post–
Apollo 8
proud-thrilled-happy pictures).

“It was very difficult,” she states finally. “Everybody tried to make a joke out of all the difficulties that we had. We just thought that was the way life was. Then again, when these flights came up that were so risky, we also knew that if we weren't there, we would have been on a base and our husbands would have been flying in Vietnam.”