Light This Candle - The Life of Alan Shepard by Neal Thompson

Author:Neal Thompson [Thompson, Neal]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780609610015
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2004-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

At times Henri Landwirth felt caught between his two favorite astronauts: Alan Shepard and John Glenn. He knew they were two very different men, but there were qualities in each that, Landwirth felt, strangely complemented the other.

He heard the gripes about Glenn from others. There was the friend of Glenn’s who told a Life reporter that “John tries to behave as if every impressionable youngster in the country were watching him every moment of the day.” And there was the time Schirra gave Glenn a boatload of grief after watching him return to the Holiday Inn from an alleged run on the beach, then splash water on his face so it looked like sweat. But Landwirth generally got along well with Glenn, who could “make me laugh.”

Shepard, on the other hand, could infuriate Landwirth with his sarcasm. “I could have choked him at times in the old days,” he recalled. And he thought Shepard’s pranks could be mean-spirited. One time Shepard and Leo D’Orsey made plans to meet with Landwirth at a hotel in Miami. They told Landwirth the hotel didn’t allow Jews, so they would have to sneak him in. Putting a raincoat over Landwirth’s head, they scuttled him through the lobby and into a service elevator, where they confessed that they were just messing with him, and both busted out laughing.

Landwirth came to learn, however, that if you put up with Shepard’s sharp edges, his antagonism and unpredictable moods, and earned his trust, the payoff was a loyal friend and “a great charmer and a gentleman.”

He was always impressed when he’d watch Shepard work a crowd. Though with colleagues or fans, Shepard could so often be icily antisocial, at certain social events he could “charm a whole room by himself—I don’t care how many people were there,” Landwirth recalled. “Especially the women.”

Freed from wearing the required Navy uniform each day, a latent predilection for style also emerged, and Shepard established himself as the best-dressed of the astronauts.

Different as Shepard and Glenn were, Landwirth saw qualities the other astronauts didn’t seem to possess. Also, each seemed to be planning far sooner than the others for their life after space. In time, Landwirth would help each of them in different ways. For Shepard, Landwirth would boost him toward riches. Glenn would get a boost toward political power. And one day Shepard and Glenn would repay Landwirth handsomely.

But in 1960, Landwirth’s friendship with Shepard and Glenn put him in a tricky spot between the two most aggressive competitors among the Mercury Seven. While Landwirth had the luxury of befriending them both, the other astronauts would have to choose. And deciding between Shepard and Glenn would lead to fissures between the seven, deep and complicated divisions that would break the team apart.

Glenn tried diplomatically to divert the media’s attention from the competition for the first flight, claiming to one reporter that the space race was “bigger than one individual.” But Shepard, in an interview at the time, made no such pretensions. He told a reporter that he had always been competitive—still was.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.