Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman Read online

  When her husband called, Louise had a dozen things to tell him—about their girls, the house, the pesky press, her golf game—but she forgot them all. None of it seemed important now. She knew it could be the last time they spoke. Ever. “We’ll be watching you on TV,” she said. “Be sure to wave when you lift off.”

  “Right,” he said, and laughed. “I’ll open the hatch and stick my arm out.”

  Shepard, uncharacteristically, didn’t have much else to say that morning, either. Finally, Louise told him to “hurry home.”

  “I will,” he said.

  “I love you.”

  Shepard hung up, then walked into the suit-up room. Technicians and engineers avoided any conversation with him. If he wanted to talk, he’d have to be the one to start. Suit technician Joe Schmitt barely shared a dozen words with Shepard as Schmitt worked himself into a sweat squeezing Shepard into the tight, silvery space suit.

  Just before leaving the hangar that housed the astronauts’ quarters and exam rooms, Shepard winked at Dee O’Hara, the astronauts’ kewpie-doll-cute and devoted nurse, who stood near the exit clutching her rosary beads. “Well, here I go, Dee,” he said, and Dee just waved, fighting back tears.

  Shepard climbed into a transport van, leaned back in a reclining chair, and placed a portable oxygen tank on the floor beside him. He looked and acted like a space-alien businessman riding a commuter bus, with his silvery briefcase by his side.

  The van pulled up at the foot of the Redstone rocket, bathed in floodlights, plumes of blue and white oxygen fumes venting from its wafer-thin sides. At eighty-three feet, the rocket was no taller than a mature birch tree. It would take nearly seven of them stacked end to end to reach the height of the Washington Monument. But Shepard was proud of his little capsule-topped rocket and called her “that little rascal.” As he approached the rocket, he asked Mission Control for permission to exit the transport van ahead of schedule. He knew he’d never see the “bird” again, so he stopped to symbolically kick the tires.

  She’s got an air of expectancy, he thought. A lovely sight . . . long and slender.

  Suddenly the crewmen behind him broke into applause, and for a moment the emotions of the day caught up with Shepard. Life magazine photographer Ralph Morse, the scrappy little New Yorker who had become a good friend, began snapping away, and one of his shots would occupy half a page in the New York Times. Shepard turned to speak to the crew but his throat choked up and he just waved.

  On the elevator ride to the top, Douglas gave him a box of crayons—“So you’ll have something to do up there.” Shepard laughed loudly, almost fogging his visor, but grateful for the tension breaker. He handed the box to Douglas, telling him he was going to be a little busy. At the top of the gantry—in an antechamber whose translucent green walls, like those of a beach-side motel, earned it the nickname Surfside 5—stood Glenn.

  Glenn wore sterile white coveralls and a paper cap like a butcher’s. He greeted Shepard as he exited the elevator, then helped him squeeze through the two-foot-square opening of the capsule Shepard had named Freedom 7. As Shepard settled into the couch that had been contoured to his body, he looked up at the instrument panel and laughed into his visor. Taped there was a sign that read No Handball Playing in This Area. Beside that was a centerfold ripped from a girlie magazine. Shepard took one look at Glenn’s giggling face, impressed that the Boy Scout was capable of such a crafty gotcha.

  Right from the start—in 1959, when NASA had chosen seven test pilots to train to become the first astronauts—it was clear the two front-runners and competing leaders of the group would be Shepard and Glenn. The bad boy and the altar boy.

  Glenn, the silver-tongued, freckle-faced all-American, spoke eloquently to the press about God and family and serving his country. The others just shook their heads at him, disgusted at his pandering but secretly impressed by his locution.

  Shepard, on the other hand, epitomized the cynical, smart-ass fighter jock. You could see it in the strutting, superior way he carried himself. He didn’t grin like Glenn; he smirked. Instead of cloying the press, he snapped at them; when asked why he wanted to be the first astronaut, he quipped, “I want to be first because I want to be first.”

  The opposing personalities of Shepard and Glenn reflected the duality of veteran military men who emerged from cloistered military fraternities to become overnight celebrities. They were, as John Kennedy called them, men of a “new generation” who would compete in “a race for the mastery of the sky.” They were also adventurous, combative, indulgent thrill-seekers who performed ludicrous, death-taunting feats in supersonic jets, then rewarded themselves with whiskey, women, and fast cars.

  Tensions between Shepard and Glenn came to a notorious head in late 1960. Glenn was sound asleep early one morning in his San Diego hotel room when the phone rang. Shepard, calling from nearby Tijuana, Mexico, explained that he’d been out drinking, spending time with a female friend, and had let his guard down, allowing a reporter and photographer to tail him. “I need your help,” he told Glenn.

  Glenn handled the situation with a frenetic round of phone calls that kept the story from ever reaching newsprint. The next day he told the other six astronauts they had dodged a bullet and should start thinking about keeping their pants zipped. A few weeks later the astronauts were asked to cast a vote for the man— besides themself—they’d like to see become the first American in space.

  Glenn knew who the others would pick—the bad-ass, not the kiss-ass. He was right, and when NASA made it official—on January 19, at a secret meeting the night before John F. Kennedy’s inauguration—Shepard just stared at the floor, trying not to smirk and offend the other six as their boss announced that he would get the first flight. In the toughest competition of his contest-filled life, Shepard had won—the bad boy had prevailed. And Glenn had no choice but to take an enormous gulp of pride and serve as Shepard’s sidekick.

  Shepard, meanwhile, just loved calling Glenn “my backup.”

  On the morning of May 5, 1961, one of the greatest crowds Florida had ever seen descended upon its beaches. Men and women skipped work, pulled their children from school, and to the north and south of Cape Canaveral arrived early, carrying lawn chairs and binoculars, hoping for a glimpse of history.

  Across the nation, millions sat glued to their televisions. President Kennedy stood in his secretary’s office with his wife and brother by his side. Shepard’s parents sat side by side in their New Hampshire living room; even though Shepard’s father had opposed his son’s decision to become an astronaut, he now sat in an easy chair, watching calmly and proudly. Louise Shepard kneeled before her television, reaching to touch the frail image of the thin rocket that would soon carry her husband.

  At that moment John Glenn’s hands were reaching into Shepard’s cramped capsule. Glenn retrieved the handball sign and the centerfold, then helped strap Shepard tightly into his couch and attached the many hoses, wires, and sensors from his suit to the capsule’s dashboard. In the months leading up to that morning, a certain dignity had befallen the relationship between Shepard and Glenn. They were inseparable during the final weeks of training. To escape the tension-filled cacophony of Cape Canaveral, they’d jog on a nearby isolated beach, chase sand crabs, and dive into the cool waves of the Atlantic; at night, they’d sit for hours after dinner, discussing each detail of the upcoming flight, then retire together to the same room, sleeping just a few feet apart.

  Just before they closed the hatch Glenn reached in one last time and shook Shepard’s gloved hand. Shepard was suddenly moved by how gracious Glenn had been. He thanked his colleague and then jerked a thumbs-up.

  “See you soon,” he said, his voice muffled inside his helmet.

  “Happy landings, Commander,” Glenn responded as the crew standing behind him shouted good luck and goodbye.

  Technicians closed and bolted the hatch, and Shepard was alone. Monitors showed that his heartbeat quickened a bit as they shut him inside, and
Shepard thought, Okay, buster. You volunteered for this thing. Now don’t screw up.

  It was dawn. He’d been awake five hours, and the rising sun began to shine through the periscope screen two feet from his face. He started going through his checklist—a newspaper the next day would accidentally print that Shepard was reviewing his “chick list.” Then he started through all the procedures he and Glenn had practiced for months. As he did this, he began to think about where he was and where the others were.

  I’m going to be the first, he thought. Glenn was on the outside of the capsule, helping disconnect hoses and cables. The other astronauts were performing various backup duties. Shepard’s rocket would soon leave them all behind in its fiery dust, rising higher and farther and faster than any of them—than any American—had ever been.

  There would be many battles in the years to come: personal, professional, financial, physical, marital, legal. But in the battle to be first, which was the biggest prize of the astronaut game, it appeared Shepard was about to win. The boy who had been smaller, weaker, and slower than the others had forced himself to become better than the rest and had become the man, the flyboy, he’d always wanted to be.

  Years later, when asked about his greatest accomplishment, Shepard would say that being chosen to be the first American in space was the highlight of his career, of his life. A close second was reaching the moon in 1971, but that was more personal. He’d fought back from severe illness to get there, and spoke less about the moon’s effect on his life. But ten years earlier, being picked above the other six—that had defined him.

  It was never the fifteen-minute flight itself that symbolized his life. He’d had more thrilling adventures as a test pilot and fighter jock. Landing wounded jets on storm-tossed aircraft carriers and working the dangerous kinks out of the nation’s newest, fastest aircraft—some of those moments had given him more of a heart-thumping rush than riding on a rocket. But being chosen, being first, winning—that was the thing.

  Because for Shepard, life was one big competition. And as he sat that morning locked inside his capsule, at the tip of an eighty-three-foot bullet, with America’s most sophisticated machinery hissing and humming all around him, he knew he had won.

  Just before they pulled away the gantry, leaving him atop his rocket alone, he saw a face in the screen of the periscope. The fish-eye screen made the face appear round and distorted, but it looked “close and friendly.”

  It was John Glenn.

  Grinning.

  Shepard was thirty-seven the day he became the first American in space; thirty-seven years later, I was working as a reporter at the Baltimore Sun and received a call from an editor telling me that Alan Shepard had died and asking me to contribute a few paragraphs to his obituary.

  A quick Internet search that day told me that, except for a thin 1962 young-adult book, no biography existed on America’s first astronaut. When I decided to make up for that omission, I quickly discovered why no one had ventured to write about Shepard.

  Alan Shepard felt no compunction to explain to the world, to anyone, who he was and where he’d been. He hoarded his privacy, to the point of turning down many lucrative endorsement offers. In death, those loyal to him continued to protect that privacy.

  Sure, there were things he was hiding—women, business deals, broken friendships, marital strife—that he knew might tarnish his hero’s image. But by venturing beyond that image, into Shepard’s past, into a few dark corners, I found a more human, complex, and complete man than the Corvette-driving stud I’d been awed by in Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff.

  This book began as a series of questions: How does a man reach the front lines of the cold war? Where does an edgy, competitive explorer go after he’s already gone where few men have? How does someone reach the moon and how does he survive after he’s gone there? By picking through the scattered clues Shepard left behind, by enlisting the help of some family members and scores of friends and colleagues, by gaining access to some of Shepard’s military records and his FBI files, what emerges in response to those questions is a large, energetic, and aggressive life. A life that, before and after space, pulsed with mystery, romance, and adventure. Shepard was the military version of what Elvis was to music, what James Dean was to Hollywood, what Kerouac was to literature. Today’s man was once a boy who wanted to be Alan Shepard. But, until now, his true story has never been fully told. It’s the story of life fully lived, and entwined through it is—somewhat surprisingly for a man so famous for philandering—a love story.

  His beautiful wife, Louise, might have told the story. But after fifty-three years of marriage, she followed him into oblivion, dying suddenly and mysteriously, five weeks after he did, on an airplane, forty thousand feet above earth.

  Part I

  BEFORE SPACE

  1

  “Alan was really kind of a loner”

  Alan Shepard confounded people. He angered, intimidated, and embarrassed them; insulted, taunted, or—worst of all—ignored them. Yet for all his maddening iciness, people were drawn to him, because just beneath his cold shell was an intelligent, curious man who could be charming, hilarious, warm, inviting, generous, and even sexy.

  There was no way to anticipate which of Alan Shepard’s personalities would emerge on a given day: aloof and remote one day, buying you drinks the next. Possibly the only consistent aspect of his character was its unpredictable duality. That and the obsessive drive to be, as one astronaut put it, “better than anyone else.”

  At every stage of his life, Shepard’s effect on family, friends, and colleagues was that of a competitor in a hurry, constantly lurching forward, with no stomach for delays or incompetence. He was attracted to people with something to offer, those with skills, information, or money who could help him achieve his goals. But if you had nothing to offer, “you’d better get out of town,” said one longtime friend.

  “He was hard to get to know. But once he put his arm around you, you knew he was there,” said astronaut Deke Slayton’s wife, Bobbie. “If you were a friend of Al’s and you needed something, you could call him and he’d break his neck trying to get it for you. If you were in, you were in. It was just tough to get in.”

  Shepard’s frenetic, unreadable personality churned behind a pair of wide, wild eyes, his most prominent facial feature. Googly, buggy things. Heavy-lidded, they distended out from deep sockets. When he wasn’t smiling—he could ignite a huge smile, too, with long, askew teeth framed by meaty lips—it was the eyes people noticed first. Icy blue and intense sometimes, other times warm and watery, but always open wide.

  Throughout his life, friends and family spoke of the “infamous stare” Shepard could inflict. Confidence, smarts, ego, anger, hunger all poured through his bulgy eyes. But, like mirrors, they worked only one way, giving nothing back.

  Behind the mirrors burbled a mysterious stew of contradictions. He was swaggeringly cocky, often referring to himself in the third person or as “the world’s greatest test pilot.” And yet he could be humble and self deprecating. Despite a notorious impatience, Shepard also displayed an attention to detail that earned him key assignments as a Navy pilot. “He didn’t do anything until he had studied it, tested it, and made damn sure he could do it,” said James Stockdale, a onetime test pilot colleague of Shepard’s.

  In the cockpit of an airplane, Shepard flew with confidence, without fear, always in control, and with an uncanny spatial awareness that can’t be taught. “He could fly anything,” one colleague said. Another called him “the best aviator I’ve ever known.” But Shepard also had a persistent habit of infuriating superiors by flouting Navy rules, flying dangerously low over beaches, beneath bridges, and upside down. He was “flamboyant” and “indulgent,” growled one former supervisor.

  Though his flamboyant indulgences once took him to the brink of a Navy court-martial, those same flinty qualities earned him a spot as one of the nation’s first seven astronauts. “He was an egotist” and “a typical Ne
w Englander . . . hard, cold,” said one NASA official, Chris Kraft. “But he was all business when it came to flying.”

  When he joined the other Mercury Seven astronauts, the same question constantly simmered: Who was Alan Shepard? One astronaut considered him “bitterly competitive, to the point of being cutthroat.” Another once accused Shepard of “swindling” him in a business deal. And one astronaut’s wife said Shepard “really didn’t want to have anything to do with the rest of us, the common folk.”

  Indeed, he worked hard at setting himself apart. He’d attend casual backyard barbecues in a suit and tie, and he drove a flashy Corvette for the better part of thirty years. He befriended race car drivers, comedians, pro golfers, and millionaires, collected celebrity friends like Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope, Mickey Rooney, and Clint Eastwood. Then again, while he often acted the part of a self-sufficient loner with little need for others’ company, he was just as often a party boy who loved good pranks and nights of drinking with buddies. Shepard cherished good times and pursued them vigorously. Some guessed that his need for a good time was a necessary counterweight to his constant, annoying competitiveness. Al Neuharth, who founded USA Today, said Shepard “wanted to win, whether it was pool or cards or whatever. He wanted to win, to be number one.”

  The privacy fence Shepard erected around the perimeter of his personal life shielded another of the contradictions of his persona: that of a ferocious womanizer and, at the same time, a devoted family man and an unashamed admirer of his wife, Louise.

  Like many Navy men of his day, Shepard successfully navigated among exotic women in the barrooms of international ports of call. He perfected those skills as a celebrity-astronaut; one NASA colleague called him “the biggest flirt in the country—but it went beyond flirting.” A fellow test pilot said, “He had a beautiful wife and family. I just never quite understood it. But this was his compulsion.”