“It was definitely not a piece of cake for me. If you think going to the Moon is hard, try staying at home.” -Barbara Cernan.
The Astronaut Wives Club was an actual organization from the beginning of the space program, operating as a support group for each other in a very weird new world of fame, some more money, and having to come off as being perfect and happily married at all times. This might not sound as exciting to read since it takes place on the ground rather than in space, and at a very prim-and-proper time, but the author has great sympathy for her subjects, and also a fair amount of delightful snark about what was going on. Here’s my favorite line, about how Alan Shepherd was a compulsive cheater and his wife Louise stuck by him “because I’m the one he really loves” and how she focuses on needlepoint instead:
“She never stuck the wrong color in the wrong square, and rarely seemed to miss a hole. Neither did Alan.”
Let’s meet a few of the wives and what they had going on:
- Trudy Cooper was forced to go back to her cheating husband Gordo so they’d let him into space.
- Annie Glenn had a bad stutter and had to have other people speak for her frequently. At one point LBJ wanted to “just drop by” the house and Annie refused, and her husband backed her up to the hilt despite the pressure they were getting.
- Rene Carpenter (a spicy lady) came up with “a one-woman show that she called “Primly Stable,” starring the perfect astronaut wife Primly Stable, married to her astronaut, Squarely, with their little Dickie and Mary and dog Smiley.”
- Two wives got mixed up so much that their gynecologist couldn’t keep track. “You remind me so much of Mrs. Lovell.” “Inside or out?”
- Buzz Aldrin gave his wife Joan a monkey. Twice. She loved the first one, but not the second. “Buzz, I’ve had it. It’s either the monkey or me. Somebody’s leaving.” He just stared at her. Conveniently, PoPo II drowned in the pool…. Okay, that’s my own interpretation.
The ladies had to pretend to be perfect at all times, and that they weren’t living in fear every time their husband launched. They were told not to stress out their husbands at home, and they couldn’t even blab to each other because fear was contagious.
When new astrowives were added in, there were definitely some…growing pains, some difficulties, some people who were more into it (or WAY into it) than others. (Example: when one wife sees her nametag as Sue and snaps that it’s Susan, the other wife glares at her and rips it up, while saying, “Okay, Sue.”) It also gets funnier as hippie stuff becomes more popular, and god forbid Rusty Schweickart have kinda scruffy hair. Or my favorite astronaut, Edgar Mitchell, doing ESP experiments from space.
While a few of the guys seem like good eggs, a lot of them…yeah, don’t sound like the best husbands (NASA doesn’t pick ‘em for emotionality). (Alan Shepherd: “Before I went to the Moon, I was a rotten S.O.B. Now I’m just an S.O.B.” And a lot, a lot, a lot of them had “Cape cookies” in Florida. I note that by the end of the book, almost all of the wives are divorced or widowed, with only seven out of the first thirty “space families” still together.
The widows were supported by their space families, but not so much by NASA once their husbands were buried. (Ominously, we’re told that Gus Grissom, before his death, picked up a lemon from the yard and said he was going to hang it on his spacecraft.) Some wives moved on in a hurry, one wife really didn’t and ended up killing herself. Though I did appreciate the sass of Beth Williams, who cussed out NASA, rejected the banana nut bread loves, and hated being told her husband C.C. died doing what he loved and “If he died doing what he loved, he would’ve been in bed with me.” Also, “She let it be known that if she received one more copy of The Prophet…she might throw it at the well-wisher.” And she wore a gaucho hat to the funeral.
Overall, I enjoyed it, four stars. Great, empowering, snarky fun read.
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