If the NASA astronauts had “the right stuff,” Lily Koppel wants the world to know that their wives had it, too.
The journalist and book author visited the Vero Beach Book Center last week to discuss her book, “The Astronaut Wives Club.”
Released in hardcover in 2013 and in paperback this month, the book uses extensive interviews with the surviving wives to chronicle the story of American space flight from the women’s perspective. It is also the basis for a television series of the same name, currently scheduled to air in spring 2015 on ABC.
Koppel (no relation to Ted Koppel) writes for publications including The New York Times and The Huffington Post. Her first book, 2008’s bestselling “The Red Leather Diary,” chronicles the story of a New York City teenager from a 1930s diary that made its way into Koppel’s hands after the clearing out of the basement of a Manhattan apartment building.
Her second book again centers on women’s lives, but this time the focus is on suburbia and the optimistic, space-crazed era that began in the 1960s.
Koppel says she looks for “lightning-strikes ideas” when choosing her book subjects. But she adds, “The caveat with that is you have to sort of wait for serendipity to come your way.”
She told the Book Center audience that she was at home one Saturday when the idea for this second book struck. “I was looking at this big coffee table book of the Apollo mission. The photos of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin depicted such a robust, masculine world. Then I turned a page and saw this incredible photo of the astro-wives in these sky-rocketing beehives and candy-colored Pucci mini-dresses.”
“I turned to my husband – who, like myself, is a huge fan of ‘The Right Stuff’ – and said, ‘Has there ever been a book on the astronaut wives?’”
There hadn’t. With that, a three-year journey toward the published book was born.
The process began with the author traveling the country for months in order to talk to the surviving women. She eventually talked to approximately 30 of the women who comprised the bulk of the group informally known as the Astronaut Wives Club. Their husbands were selected for missions in the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs.
Though the women are not well-known today, they share iconic last names. Annie Glenn, who is now 94, was not able to be interviewed for the book, and some of the wives have passed on. But Joan Aldrin, Rene Carpenter, Marilyn Lovell, Jo Shirra, and many others shared their perspectives. So did astronauts including Jim Lovell (remembered for his famous words “Houston, we have a problem”) and Buzz Aldrin, as well as a number of what were called the “astro-kids.”
Koppel listened to the women’s stories, pored over photographs and scrapbooks, and even saw some of the actual clothing the wives wore back in the “space days,” clothing the book describes as “Doris Day-like finery for the Mercury missions, ‘60s mod for Gemini, and ‘70s suburban psychedelic for Apollo.”
In one memorable moment, Betty Grissom, the widow of Gus Grissom, offered to show Koppel her fur hot pants.
Sharing a slide show of photographs by and of the women, Koppel said the small details of life in the “space days” were part of the pleasure of the project.
“There’s something really enchanting about this world of martinis and overflowing ashtrays,” Koppel says, “the whole scene at the wives’ splash-down parties, where they would gather together around the black-and-white television sets and watch their husbands’ launches and arrivals back on earth.”
The women themselves were a welcome surprise. “When I began the research, my only fear was that maybe these women were too perfect. But I found that each of them was different, and complicated in her own way.”
“I wanted the wives’ story to be reflective of who they were: fun-loving, quirky, deeply emotional women,” the author explains. “I didn’t want to write an academic treatise.”
Koppel chronicles the wives’ transformation from ordinary housewives living on military bases to instant celebrities. “They seem like America’s first reality stars,” she says. “Even when they were chauffeuring their kids to school or picking them up from ballet or music lessons, they could have a Life magazine reporter and photographer in the back of their car peering over their shoulder. These women always felt like they were on camera.”
Life magazine was given exclusive coverage of the personal stories of the astronauts and their wives. Each wife was assigned her own individual ghostwriter, and the women were extensively photographed together and separately.
In the group shot chosen for the jacket of the hardcover edition of “The Astronauts Wives Club,” the seven perfectly coiffed and dressed Mercury wives pose smiling around a red model of the small Mercury capsule their husbands would take into space.
Despite the barrage of publicity, Koppel says, many of the realities the wives faced had to be kept secret at the time.
Fear was a constant companion. So was loneliness. And as the book makes clear, the pressure on astronauts’ marriages was intense.
“When they were picked in 1959, the Mercury 7 men were given rock star status. They were seven supermen who were going to take us to the stars and beat the Soviets into space,” Koppel says.
A variety of perks came along with the astronauts’ new fame, including attention from adoring ladies.
Known as “Cape Cookies,” the men’s female fans flocked to the Holiday Inn in Cocoa Beach, where the astronauts stayed for $1 a night. “The Cape was really the men’s playground. Later, when the wives moved to Houston, there developed these two very separate worlds,” Koppel says.
The author smiled as she arrived at the Book Center to find a plate of star-shaped cookies being shared with the event’s attendees. “I should tweet that!” she said as a bystander quipped these were “a more innocent kind of cookie.”
But for the wives, “Cape Cookies” were no laughing matter.
“The wives had a daunting task, which was holding up the whole propaganda effort. If they let the façade shatter, their husbands’ careers could be stalled or hurt in some way.” Chief among the unofficial rules NASA had was that men without a happy marriage would not be granted a space flight.
In order to survive, the women chose to support rather than strive against each other. They shared tips on dealing with the press, comforted each other as they watched their husbands’ launches and splash-downs, held monthly coffees, and kept each other grounded as they and the nation experienced the ups and downs of early space flight together.
One of the wives later commented that their message to each other was, “If you need us, come.”
It was an informal association for the most part, but also a lifetime bond. The women from many of the missions came together in a reunion in 1991. Even today, the wives meet regularly for getaways and space-related anniversaries. They share a hope that men and women will continue to explore space, are deeply patriotic, and feel very protective of one another.
“While their husbands were launched into space, they were being launched as modern American women,” Koppel writes. “If not for the wives, the strong women in the background who provided essential support to their husbands, man might never have walked on the moon.”
