Skywriting with Gus and Deke

By R.Z. Sheppard

THE RIGHT STUFF by Tom Wolfe; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 436 pages; $12.95

May 5, 1961: the day Alan Shepard scratched his back on the edge of space and America entered the manned space race. At last. Since 1957 there had been all those Sputniks--Mechtas and Vostoks--beeping overhead, clockwork reminders that the heavens were in the hands of the godless Bolshevik. The script had gone awry. A nation only 40 years from feudalism was secretly lobbing what looked like customized samovars at the free world while priapic Vanguards and Jupiters wilted on their pads or exploded prematurely for all the world to see. Democracy could be embarrassing.

The oaken voice of Walter Cronkite echoes in the memory of America's entry into the competition. There were resonant suspense at lift-offs and tremolos of pride at splashdowns: America still had the right stuff, Wolfe's buzz word for the indefinable attributes of the astronauts. His long awaited book about test pilots and the Mercury flights recalls those years through the eyes and nerve endings of the first astronauts, their wives and even the conditioned chimpanzees who rode prototype capsules downrange from Cape Canaveral: The chimp's &"heart rate shot up as he strained against the force, but he didn't panic for a moment. He had been through this same sensation many times on the centrifuge. As long as he just took it and didn't struggle, they wouldn't zap all those goddamned blue bolts into the soles of his feet. There were a lot worse things in this world than g-forces ... The main thing was to keep ahead of those blue bolts in the feet!... He started pushing the buttons and throwing the switches like the greatest electric Wurlitzer organist who ever lived..."

The jazzy mix of facts and fictional technique, Celine's ellipses, the gadzooks delivery and a presumptuous ape's-eye view that would have curled Henry James' worsteds--these are unmistakable parts of Wolfe's style. It is still called the New Journalism, although the form is as old as the Beatles and the author is now 48. Like the Beatles, Wolfe has had a revolutionary impact on his field. His imitators have spread like dandelion fluff, and his work still stirs furious debate.

Yet even the creakiest practitioner of the inverted-pyramid style of journalism will have to agree that behind the mannered realism of The Right Stuff thumps the heart of a traditionalist. The organizing principle of the book is an old-fashioned fascination with, and admiration for, the test pilots and fighter jocks of the U.S.'s first astronaut team: Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Alan Shepard and Deke Slayton. In addition, the book has a superhero, Chuck Yeager, a World War II combat veteran who broke the sound barrier in 1947 and rewrote aviation history in experimental rocket-powered planes of the '50s and early '60s.

Yeager dips out of Wolfe's pages as the undisputed king of the right stuff, the man whose no-sweat, West Virginia drawl sounds like the archetype for modern airlinese ("We've got a little ol' red light up here on the control panel that's tryin' to tell us that the landin' gears're not... uh ... lockin' into position"). He is also the book's main foil, a member of a vanishing breed of hot-rock pilot in an age of increasingly automated flight.

The astronauts were sensitive about their missions' being controlled by earth-bound technicians. The chosen seven had pulled out of enough tight corners and survived enough glitches to rise to the top of what Wolfe, in a seizure of cliche avoidance, calls "the ziggurat." As a reminder that he was there too, Yeager told reporters he did not want to be an astronaut because they did no real flying. He then rubbed it in by saying that "a monkey's gonna make the first flight." Shepard, Glenn and company bucked back, demanding and getting concessions like an override control stick and windows in the capsule. The men had been selected for their experience, superb physical conditioning and ability to stand psychological stress. What the groundlings had not anticipated was commensurate egos.

John Glenn, for example: Wolfe sketches him as a bit of a prig, a jogging, strait-laced Presbyterian driving an underpowered Peugeot, who scolded his colleagues for their after-hours whoopee. The current Senator from Ohio, Wolfe suggests, may have gone to NASA officials in an effort to replace Shepard on the first flight. Others, too, according to Wolfe, would act in ways that demonstrated that "feeling of superiority, appropriate to him and to his kind." Gus Grissom almost certainly blew the hatch too soon, flooding and sinking his capsule, and then stubbornly maintained that the machine "malfunctioned." Scott Carpenter, a man who could hold his breath for 171 seconds, ignored warnings about wasting hydrogen peroxide fuel and nearly skipped off the earth's atmosphere during reentry.

Six years in the research and writing, Wolfe's most ambitious work is crammed with inside poop and racy incident that 19 years ago was ignored by what he terms the "proper Victorian Gents" of the press. The fast cars, booze, astro groupies, the envies and injuries of the military caste system were not part of what Americans would have considered the right stuff. Wolfe lays it all out in brilliantly staged Op Lit scenes: the tacky cocktail lounges of Cocoa Beach where one could hear the Horst Wessel Song sung by ex-rocket scientists of the Third Reich; Vice President Lyndon Johnson furiously cooling his heels outside the Glenn house because Annie Glenn would not let him in during her husband's countdown; Alan Shepard losing a struggle with his full bladder moments before liftoff; the overeager press terrifying Ham the chimp after his proficient flight; the astronauts surrounded by thousands of cheering Texans waving hunks of rare meat during an honorary barbecue in the Houston Coliseum.

Although Wolfe touches on space-race politics and the psychology of cour age, his views are neither unconventional nor meant to be. As our finest verbal illustrator of trends and fashions, he is interested in the truths that lie on surfaces. These truths are not superficial, though they are frequently overlooked in an age partial to overexplanations and psychic temperature taking. A 19th century novelist of manners would have understood perfectly. Readers in the 21st century will too, when they turn to Wolfe to find out the kind of stuff their grandparents were made of. -- R.Z. Sheppard

Nearly 15 years ago, a vanilla tornado named Tom Wolfe whirled out of Esquire and the New York Herald Tribune's Sunday magazine supplement to announce the coming of the pop-rock culture. Readers accustomed to spending their weekends with articles like "Brazil: Colossus of the South" were suddenly snapping awake to such Wolfean fare as "Oh, Rotten Gotham --Sliding Down Into the Behavioral Sink," "Natalie Wood and the Shockkkkkk of Recognition" and "Muvva Earth and Codpiece Pants." The prose itself rollicked with words like "lollygagging" and "infarcted," embedded in pages that were covered with a confetti of punctuation marks.

The writer was equally eye-catching: a tall, pale, boyish figure whose trademark was a gleaming white suit. He looked like a collegian out of Held's Angels, or a swell in Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies. Raised in Richmond, Va., Wolfe spoke softly and courteously, exuding an air of the right stuff. But he wrote like a hit man. "Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street's Land of the Walking Dead!" was a surprise attack on the genteel New Yorker magazine and its shy, venerated editor, William Shawn. A shocked cultural establishment struck back. An outraged Joseph Alsop and E.B. White called Wolfe's piece brutal, misleading and irresponsible. Richard Goodwin sent a bolt from the White House. "I didn't think I'd survive," says Wolfe, "but it taught me a lesson. You can be denounced from the heavens, and it only makes people interested."

He put that lesson to use again in 1970 when he discovered an invitation on a colleague's desk announcing a cocktail party honoring the Black Panthers. The event was to be held at the Manhattan home of Maestro Leonard Bernstein. Wolfe attended, steno pad and ball point ready. The result was Radical Chic, another heretical howler that captured the well-intentioned banalities of "limousine liberals." A few years later, in The Painted Word, Wolfe took on the New York art establishment, setting forth the impish thesis that a few powerful critics controlled what was painted and sold.

Wolfe is certainly a man who would rather lead than follow. The Right Stuff grew out of his "curiosity about what made men shoot dice with death." What he discovered in thousands of miles and more than 100 interviews was that pilots lived "in a world where there are no honorable alternatives." Wolfe has already done all the research on Gemini, Apollo and Skylab, and plans to write about them as well. Why did the current book take six years? "It was a structural problem," he says. "There are no surprises in the plot and a great many characters."

While waiting for his muse, the author took on other writing assignments, including a 20,000-word introduction to a book about the New Journalism. He also was married, 16 months ago, to Sheila Berger, the art director of Harper's magazine. The couple live in a town-house apartment at the heart of Bloomingdale country in Manhattan's East 60s. Wolfe, in fact, is the flaneur of Third Avenue, who enjoys few things more than window shopping and observing his fellow East-siders in their varying plumage. He himself owns nine $600 white suits, a style he says sadly has been debased by The Great Gatsby and Saturday Night Fever knockoffs. He recently went to yellow silk, but notes that the suit is so loud "dogs skulk away."

Wolfe's unchanging style of expensive elegance is clearly a harmless form of aggression and a splendiferous advertisement for his individuality. The game requires a lot of reverse spin and body English but it boils down to antichic chic. Exclaims Wolfe proudly: "I own no summer house, no car, I wear tank tops when I swim, long white pants when I play tennis, and I'm probably the last man in America to still do the Royal Canadian Air Force exercises."

Excerpt

"A young fighter jock was like the preacher in Moby Dick who climbs up into the pulpit on a rope ladder and then pulls the ladder up behind him; except the pilot could not use the words necessary to express the vital lessons ... He wanted to associate only with other fighter pilots. Who else could understand the nature of the little proposition (right stuff/death) they were all dealing with? And what other subject could compare with it? ... To talk about it in so many words was forbidden, of course. The very words death, danger, bravery, fear were not to be uttered except in the occasional specific instance or for ironic effect. Nevertheless, the subject could be adumbrated in code or by example. Hence the endless evenings of pilots huddled together talking about flying. On these long and drunken evenings... certain theorems would be propounded and demonstrated--and all by code and example. One theorem was: There are no accidents and no fatal flaws in the machines; there are only pilots with the -- wrong stuff."

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