Please welcome lily koppel. [applause] good morning. So nice to be here. I heard there was a vicious rumor going around and i didnt make it out of new york city because of the weathers so i am so glad volunteers believe this is actually me and im here sharing the story with you this morning. I love Great American stories and i love beehives. And a combination of those two sayings as you will learn lead me to tell this amazing but looked over american story of our original astronauts wives. I want to bring you back to 1959. April 9th there is a press conference in washington d. C. And the whole country is riveted and waiting for the announcement of the mercury 7 astronauts. Is the height of the cold war and we are looking to lease seven men, gus grissom, john glenn, allen sheppard, among them, as our cold war warriors, these silver suited spaceman who are going to take us to the stars and beyond. So you have these macho test pilots sitting up on this stage and something peculiar start happening. The reporters are raising their hands and instead of asking tell us about your bravery, about why you wanted to volunteer, the reporters want to hear what does your wife think about this . She is going to let you be catapulted into space, and so there is this immediate attention to the wives of these men. I want to tell you about some of the women. Renee carpenter is sort of the maryland monroe of the space age. She wakes up in garden grove, calif. Early in the morning and sees these headlights hovering in her yard. Is a the ufo . What is that . They are reporters who have come to interview her about what it is going to be like to be one of the wives of these spacemen. It is almost science fiction. Reporters cant believe it. Renee wanted to be an actress in high school, she opens the door, offers the reporters coffee. Some of them of brought doughnuts and they start taking pictures of her and her family as they are crawling all over her and she is a real dish. Jfk would later say he found her the most attractive of all the astronaut wives because of course as they are going to learn, theyre going to quickly go through this cinderella like transformation. In ohio at Wrightpatterson Air Force base, and gus grissoms wife betty received a phone call the night before from her husband, he said you might want to straighten up the house of that. Some reporters might be coming tomorrow. She looks around, the house is a mess, she is just getting over the flu, she feels terrible but somehow pulls it together, goes to the doctor the next morning and as she is stopping at a Grocery Store on her way home two reporters from life magazine encounter her in the vegetable aisle and want to know what she thinks about old gusts going into space. She just wants them to leave her alone. They followed her home. She is the shrinking violets of the group, very downtoearth, folksy, always repeated a quote of gustss which is we dont give a damn about keeping up with the joneses which is more along the lines of we dont give a darn about keeping up with the glenns, annie and john glenn, the superstar couple of the space age. You cant get more apple pie than them. They literally met in a playpen as toddlers in ohio. They are just both sprinkled with freckles, john glenn having that mad magazine kid face, annie to go with it and annie was the ultimate astronaut wife. As the women soon learned, it is not only emission about getting their husbands, these great a military test pilots who not only are picked for their piloting skills but as some of the Scientists Say when they pick the astronauts, there were wild series what were going to happen, where their hearts going to stop in space . Would they stop urinating . Was there Blood Pressure going to fall to zero, they were picked for being literally human cannonballs. Can they withstand it . The why is too were actually investigated by the fbi before the couples were announced. Betty remembers investigators coming over to her neighbors home and asking questions about her. Would miss is grissom quote home cooked meal every night . She doesnt drink too much . Doesnt have any communist leanings . All of a sudden not only the astronauts but their wives, a r astrowives wives are tisch step to the entire world as examples of the height of American Family values and these wives, the most stressful time to be an american housewife, the late 15s and early 60s, has to hold up the model of perfection. So overnight they are transformed. I think of them as americas first reality stars. Life magazine bought the rights. They bought their personal stories, like magazine in 1959, a huge amount of money. In exchange for that, to reporters and photographers into their homes to chronicle their day to day lives. What was it like to have your husband sitting on top of that rocket, about to be blasted into space. The women were caught in this catch22 which is they are supposed to reveal who they are, there is acute pressure to keep up the glens to be the modern american housewife, and the book is being turned into Television Show which is going to air this summer on abc and just looking at some of the story lines it is very funny because one of the other wives of this group, trudy cooper was the only licensed pilot among the group, very adventurous girl, you had to be an adventuress woman to be married to one of these guys who were testing in their Early Careers these highperformance experimental aircraft, to go where no man has gone, first into space, then to the moon. Trudy cooper had had a little too much of this top gun mentality and her husband bordeaux gordo playing around on her. Before he was picked as an astronaut, he came with his tail between his legs back is like saying trudy, i have this amazing opportunity, i will be picked as an astronaut. The only problem is they are not going to pick me if i dont have a white and we were just separated. They get back together for the sake of the space race. They would later get divorced after gordos career is over. Those of the kind of detail the wives were very skittish about letting out as they are having this incredible public eye and spotlight shined into their lives. The Program Starts out in langley, va. All of the families pack up and moved to virginia and the men start training and they are down in cape canaveral, florida and one of the most interesting things i learned just starting out in the book was how the cape, this sort of incredible mens playgrounds down there where there are working hard but also playing hard, was a no wives zone at first. Going to the cape for a wife was totally offlimits. They werent allowed to go out where the rockets took off from, all the wives would watch the early flights from the beach. At one point Deke Slaytons wife marge said this is ridiculous. You are going into space. I cant go to the cape. What is going on out there . She tells him that hed better drive her out there and he hides her under some blankets in the back of his car and they go past military guards and she gets out there and pops up her hat and it is sort of a lonely beach jetties and scrub brush and what not. The whole country is dying for a cigarette. This is the kind of spunk and irreverence that these women brought to this brave new world of being an astronaut wife. You have seven women, all different walks of life, allen sheppards wife louise was very highbred. I think of her as the sabrina and audrey have removed character. She drew up as the gardeners daughter at longwould gardens and stayed on the east coast so when she met Jackie Kennedy she almost treated jackie like she was an old friend, they were two private school girls almost, getting to know each other. You have this band forming, these women are in the public eye and they dont know how to deal with it at first so they start giving each other words of advice. If a Reporter Asks you, something you dont know anything about, dont worry, just say it is classified. One of my favorite stories, because a lot of the inspiration for writing the book came out of these technicolor looking photographs from life magazine because the wives were on the cover of life dozens of times from 19591972 at the end of the Apollo Program. The wives have their first cover shoot and they will be clustered around this mercury capsule, which when you see it today at the smithsonian, this thing looks really flimsy, you can understand why its nickname was the can and you can understand how terrifying it would be to have your spouse ride in that thing especially since many of the early test launches had gone absolutely haywire with explosions and things just not going right until the last minute but the women are told by life and nasa that they are to where these proper pastel, the epitome of the perfect american housewife, so they set this tradition of the round robin phone call which will last throughout the space race and calling each other, i you going to wear that . What color lipstick you going to where . And they decide to wear pink lipstick and everyone will wear a shirt waist dress except for run a carpenter, Scott Carpenters life. Usable character, intellectual, a really independent woman who will end up hosting her own feminist talk show in the mid 70s and looking sort of Gloria Steinem like in the dresses and skirts but she says according to the other wives i am not going to let the government tell me what to wear. We are astronaut wives now. Our husbands are civilians, they are no longer military, so she shows up to the photo shoot and she is wearing this cocktail dress, big red roses and red high heels and of course other wives are sort of aghast. She makes the shot so you have that melding of personalities coming together. Stuff of course the men, meanwhile, they are becoming rock stars. Everything that goes along with it. They are getting 1 corvettes which they can trade in every year and get a new one. Alan shepard get the snazzy white corvette. Theyre getting 1 a night hotel rooms at the holiday inn. This is down in cocoa beach which is space city, lit up with all sorts of neon signs, moons and stars and intergalactic fanfare. The women actually come down to cocoa beach for a ladys weekend and jo schirra remembered walking into the lobby of the holiday inn and two women, the astronaut crew piece who come with the adorable name of cape cookies, fall to their knees in front of her astro not, her husband. What is going on here . So you have throughout the space race, having to maintain this semblance of everything is fine at home, of course my husband, i am sure this goes home for the holiday, as soon as he finishes work. Meanwhile of course there are all sorts of tabloid headlines coming out and everything. The Space Program moved to houston in 1962. I had a lot of fun learning about this whole area known as togethersville. This makes nonfiction writing so tantalizing. This was the space verbs where all the astronauts and wives moved. It is almost like Beverly Hills of spacemen. There were tour buses that would wind their way through the streets of these little subdivisions where john and annie glenn lived next to Scott Carpenter and his wife renee, where Betty Grissom and jo schirra lived a few streets down, where the Media Attention on these families was so acute that renee and jo had doorway built in between there two yards which they called the rabbit hole and that they could scurry back and forth between during a flight so the press wouldnt see them. Astronaut kids were chased down the halls of the holiday inn when they went to visit and were always told not to open the door to many reporters because they had this exclusive agreement with life magazine. One anecdote one of the astronaut kids shared with me that i always have fun remembering is daring apollo levon, that flight, the wives first of all, janet armstrong, pat collins, buzz aldrins wife joan, had to hide in back seats of neighbors cars, go to the beauty parlor, the Grocery Store, there was a media circus on their suburban lawns. At one point of michael collinss kid opened the door and they were given a present of a panda bear, two journalists from china handing them this caddy bear, oh wow, this is great. Turned out there was a microphone hidden inside its stomach. This kind of Marx Brothers relationship with cat and mouse game with the press and the wives. As one of the wives put it, she said our lives were composed of highs and lows, and what is so remarkable about this group of women is how downtoearth they maintained sort of their personalities. They were strongly patriotic. They felt they were given sort of an equal task in supporting their husbands mission into the stars. They were going to do everything they could to support the countrys effort to support their husbands even when it meant tucking things in the backs of the worse, emotional things to deal with for later, sweeping things under the rug. As i mentioned they were living in an almost truman show existence, no divorce was actually allowed within nasa until 1967 when it erupted in the first space divorce. The women had to rely on each other. The men were away at cape canaveral, flying their teeth 38s to florida monday morning, they would not return until friday night when they would fly their planes down low over togethersville and rattle the houses. That was some of the astronautss way of saying hi, honey, i am home. Put the rose in the oven. Your astronaut is home. I recently went back to togethersville with some of the women and went into sue bean, alan beans first wife, looking at the pool and alan bean who was the fourth man to walk in the route moon with pete conrad on apollo 12 did this mosaic bar with the Ignacio Zamora insignia and sue was very beautiful, blond, texan, looking out over the pool and said buzz and joan used to live over there and the bass ats were over there. Thists were over there. Thisets were over there. This was a really swinging place. The wives and 60s for the Astronauts Wives Club which would meet once a month to support each other and get to know each other. These were monthly tea and coffee events. Fabulous scenes that are not reproduced in womens gathering today because times have changed, doubled as and over crowing overflowing ashtrays and martini hours and just sort of being there to support each other and going through something very few will ever experience. The way the wives dont with the pressure was very different. You have the pressure of your husband and the pressure of the media. And the most dreaded moment, even more than the possibility of something going wrong on the launch pad, was opposed flight press conference. This was the moment when all the wives would have to walk out on their suburban lawn, face the cameras and give a statement and receiving very little formal coaching from nasa besides what they heard back in their air force and navy days which was feed your husband a Good Breakfast of steak and eggs so he doesnt get white headed up in the air. These women were basically just told to act pictureperfect and so they did this send up together and ran a carpenter who i mentioned, glamorous and outspoken, blond, came up with this 1woman show and called it released a land that was her send the name of the esteban wives and she was married to squarely stable, her perfect astronaut husband. They had their perfect astronaut children and their dog smiley and she said whenever Reporter Asks you tell them you are happy, fraud and thrilled, throughout the decade whenever the wives are asked how they are feeling, when their husbands were up there, in space, being blasted into space, they often say, happy, proud and frills. And of course reporters are tearing their hair out. We want to deal to hear how you feel but back then it wasnt they really werent able to put the feeling into words. They were scared of revealing too much in this highly competitive environment. If i show my fear is like my husband maybe he will be bumped from the flight. Marilyn lovell, married to jim lovell, a wonderful couple to this day, he was played by tom hanks and apollo 13. When he was going into space on one of his gemini flights, marilyn found out she was pregnant and she hid her pregnancy from jim for a few months which is pretty remarkable until he finally found out and she said i am sorry, i didnt want you to get bumped from the flight. Cheese said good idea, we should keep it secret for a longer. This is just a taste of the astrowives lives. I would like to open up the discussion to questions now because it is such a rich topic and i could talk a little more about what it was like going into these historic figuress living rooms and what it was like getting to know them as well. If anyone has questions, please do line up. In your book, you talk about one of the episodes on one of the lunar landings where the camera didnt work and there was virtually sort of a coverup because they didnt want to show that. I wonder if you could go into that. One of the most exciting things, of course, about walking on the moon, being on the moon for the guys and everybody watching back at home, that was what was so incredible about the Apollo Program. Even for someone like me who is one of the wives once asked me when i went to interview her, where were you when we landed on the moon . How old were you . I said jo, i think i was moon dust. I wasnt born yet. Whenever you become fascinated with this subject, you can go there with the guys. All you have to do is look at the youtube footage, television footage they filmed. The incident you were just talking about was apollo 12, the Second Mission to the moon. Alan bean had this Television Cameras a burgling to use to chronicle their journey and he by accident turned it into the sun, so it was burned out. The only transmission they were able to share with the public in realtime was the voices of the astronauts which are going into the wivess homes versus on the squawk boxes which are these baby intercom like spaceage device is all the wives had at home but the networks are flipping out. We are not going to get our moon footage and we had big swaths of time allowed for it. What they did was nasa had some mockups of the moon where the guys would practice going through their routines for when they were up there so they outfitted some actors in space suits and had them sort of manic what pete conrad and alan bean or beeano as his friends call him or doing on the moon and it has only fuel the conspiracy theories that anyone who has anything to do with nasa including the wives think are absolutely ludicrous. I would like to tell you all how i came to write this book and a little bit about getting to know these women today. Of course i am a writer, i live in new york with my husband who is also a writer, in the front row. Our lives are composed on a daily level of thinking about stories, thinking about ideas for great stories. This isnt something you can manufacture. Inspiration has to hit. I have to admit at that time i was quite into the show madmen, we were having a carrot a tv marathon watching it and i love the 60s time period, my grandmother used to wear pulitzer dresses, we just bought this big soda book of the moon landings with the Norman Mailer text of a fire on the moon. And i was looking through these pictures of Neil Armstrong on the lunar surface, buzz aldrin and his sort of marshmallow space suit and just having sort of a tomboy moment because these are pretty male heroic images, until i turn a page and i am hit with this burst of color. They have this club, this sort of sorority that continues to meet to this day. They go on cruises and sort of continue to support each other through times and tragedy. One of the sweet things aboutnn the connection of the lives is many of them when i met themhe were a little war a littlere coldl priceless with a tinyf golden whistle on it and thats one of their symbols. Whistle and we will be there for you. Of course, it was only a matter winning over these womensere y trust. Protective of nasa, of their husbands even if they were later after their husbands back from the moon divorced because astronauts and their wives did divorce after the Apollo Program and i see it as a casualty of the incredible amount of pressure that was on these families to come for them and tform andto just work aroune rigorous hours. Out of 30 couples only seven marriages survived. So in many ways as they pointed out, there relationships have endured longer than the marriages. It outlasted them as well. There were people that were more difficult to get to know their mothers. At the beginning everyone was sort of whistling is betty going to talk to you . I dont think that he is going to talk to you. She doesnt come to our meetings and so i was nervous because she was someone important to talk to and sure enough i got a lovely letter from her. She doesnt talk on the phone much because of her hearing that she said when you come to houston please come to my home and it was one of these interviews that i expected it to be about two hours and when we went back to her house about 10 00 at night i told her i think i should go to the hotel and get some sleep and come back tomorrow morning. And she was just fun loving andd honest and had the kind of memory she wouldve plucked out conversations that she had back in the day. They were High School Sweethearts like many of the astronauts and their wives. Her story is a tragic one. Of course during the mercury program, his capsule thinks so he is given a bad rap for that position of his and from the early days of course way men always had to deal with the pressure of what if he doesnt come back. Which is you dont talk about the danger especially with your husband coming to dont talk about the danger with your friends because it was seen as a james many of them have superstitions and my favorite woman i got to know during the project had a superstition i think we can all probably relates to which is petes pillow had to be perfectly smooth on his site of the bed in his closet door had to be closed because if she did it, she felt like something wrong could happen and this is just a reflection of the fear these women had to digest and live with. Goss always told betty that he didnt like her wearing black and she felt the only time you should ever wear black was to a funeral and purposefully she didnt end up wearing black to his funeral people to listen to something happens to me i want you to have a party. So early on she promised him, she said okay i will have a party. He is one of the men that died during the apollo fire, and this was the first largescale tragedy when the men perish in a capsule it catches fire on the ground and this is a very revealing part of what these men went through because it was excruciating. The way that they reported was relatively new lows in the official man always had to tell the wife her closest friends are always called before tuesday something bad has happened out there. I want you to go to her house right now that the women knew they were not allowed to use say anything they just had his agent told the official word could arrive, so very difficult. In the case of petty end o betto other wives in the fire, debbie ended up saving nasas sueing nasas and as a result she was basically ostracized from together as bill by the other astronauts and the astronauts lives for not touting the party line for going against the company organization. Pat weitz was a tragic story. She never really got over her husband after apollo one and when they were planning a reunion years later she actually committed suicide and they saw her as a final tragedy of the apollo one fire. So a lot of heartache in this story. But just incredible american moments that were not seen as necessarily input to report back then because we were not as focused on the fact as behind every great man is a great form in or behind every moonwalk or there is a strong woman waiting on earth and it is just a whole another sort of constellation perspective on what it took to get to the moon. Do we have any of your questions . It could be your next book three of how do the children fare in that kind of upbringing . As i talked to many of the kids it was sort of growing up in the cradle of the american dream, green lawns, a pool that was shaped like the space capsules like the the kids almost remember fondly those were the days our mother would lock us out of the house and they dont come home until dinner. You are giving me a headache and it was great because we would ride our bikes and go to the pool and that is sort of the memory. But i think its difficult having a father who is a hero but often and absentee father because they wer were a way trag so often. One of the kids remembered it was sort of strange. It was like a dad wouldnt be home a lot suddenly he would be very end of the magazine would be there and we would be doing a photo shoot out on the swing. We never did this in real life. Its probably at a lot of kids in hollywood at the old place now. Their lives were made almost reality shows so there was dealing with that and i will share one more funny anecdote which is the wives were always sort of kidding and complaining they had to drag their kids into watch the space launches, johnny would rather be watching star trek. But within your dad is doing some important stuff. Well my best friends dad is an astronauastronaut and lives acre street, those are engineers over there, and this was the world that was normal to them and the wives tried very hard to keep normal and grounded. You kind of you who do to help their lives changed after the program and i was wondering if you could share their thoughts on what was it like when that ended . Do they feel like it should continue and like there was a sense among these families at that point . Everyone was sad when mixing ended the program and these wives who i see today and i think in history they will continue to be seen and ive told this to them as a sort of pioneer space women. They were the pioneers. Their husbands were doing something we had never done before. Just the moments of going out in your backyard as jane conrad remembered when her house. Fullstop there Walking Around on the moon and she the house just cleared out and she had all of the wives over for a party about 5 30 in the morning she wandered out by the pool and just look a looked at the moon t of stared at it and i think we can all think this when we look at the mood like we went up there as a country and as human beings. But she said she remembered when she was a little girl how she used to look forward to man in the moon and she said this is trippy. My husband is the man in the moon and for this one moment she had this mystical feeling of clarity. This is the late 60s. People are into that. She said it basically vanished in a moment and then she was going back inside to do the dishes. But to get back to justify fallout after the Apollo Program, i think the most prominent example is looking at buzz aldrin and his wife. Like many they had a hard time coming back from the moon after the families and the crew members into their lives would go on these fabulous tours especially after apollo 11 they went all over the world presenting moon rocks and little cases to the clean of thing cleg going, etc. , the heads of state and while they were on this tour she shared her diary with me that she kept and she starts seeing buzz spiraling out of control. Hes been outspoken about his own alcoholism and depression he built with after coming back from the moon and that is something that changed her life. They ended up getting a divorce and they have three kids. She has an entry in her diary i think our lives will return to normal and he looked at her and said ive been to the moon. Nothing is ever going to be the same. And i think that is true for a lot of the families. You mentioned how you flipped a page in a magazine and a story came to life. If you have a moment at the end of the red leather and i hear diary what caused you to flip their . Cynic i will save that for the moment and please i havent read the book yet but i look forward to reading it. I dont know the ages of the women that you are referring to but in your research, did the idea come up with a conversation about the commercialization of space travel and would any of them ever consider the galactic would they do that themselves . To ask about going into space back in the six he sispa and lots of time with life magazine of course, if you have these articles about we are going to be putting up a couple of the astronaut had this sort of crackpot scheme and root beer stands when we colonized, so yes someone like a former tough marine said i would have gone up there in a heartbeat and the early pilot who ended up flying in the powder puff derby she would have been there in a moment but some of them are like are you kidding i want to stay down here with my feet on the ground and of course they all hope we will continue to explore and push the envelope as their husband used to say. I will just mention very deeply the red leather diary, my first book because i think it reflects on how i wanted to talk this kind of story. I grew up in chicago. And it was a new york guy in a city girl. I was in new york with that density of people Walking Around looking at these Old Buildings into these windows lit up and i just sort of naive, just to be an incredible amount of Untold Stories but there are and how everybody has a story and somehow i just wanted to be able to reveal some of those distant stars. So very serendipitously i have to say i feel quite lucky. But strange things happen to me or maybe i see the world in a different way. I notice things that seem almost fear a tale fairy tale. I came out after i graduated and i was working as a news clerk at the New York Times which is like the Devil Wears Prada that without the prada with lots of bow ties and the businessmen who would give me bits of advice. I wanted to be a novelist to which i going to return to for my next project, which is going to be fiction. I came out of the building and there was something too good to resist pus push with the dumpstr and not an ordinary because it was filled with about 50 old trunks into these were the old kinds that were brought on the titanic from paris and the french line. I am not a dumpster diver by trade but i love vintage clothing and a good story so its eight in the morning and i literally climb on top of that is to and i start you are all looking at the very odd. I started going through these dresses in the collections of handbags and among the urban treasure with a red leather diary kept from a woman from 1921 to 1934 at the height of the depression and a long fairy tale short i ended up tracking down the owner is 90 with the help of a private investigator and befriending her. She wanted to be a writer and she hosted a literary salon, she was a renaissance woman who had love affairs in her story spoke to me so much i ended up telling this story of how this comical made the way back to her and it was sort of given as a gift to the rest of the world. Telling the forgotten story was very interesting to me. Little things i remember from professors the good stories are often little margins were footnotes. Its not the typical heroic model but its the other side of the coin and it was that desire and hunger to tell the story that is an untold stor story but theres also this sort of emotional catharsis for the subject that has been under the radar revealed to the world and i know from speaking to the boys not only does this book take them back in time but they feel very gratified that people care about their story. I dont think many of them call themselves heroes because they were so