The Right Stuff

Well… Gle

One of the people who beamed that look at them with a sincere devotion was a Washington lawyer named Leo DeOrsey. Walter Bo

"I insist on only two conditions," he said.

Gle

"One," said DeOrsey, "I will accept no fee. Two, I will not be reimbursed for expenses."

He kept the grave look on his face for a moment. And then he smiled. There were no catches and no angles. He was obviously sincere. He thought they were terrific and felt tickled pink to be involved with them at all. He couldn't do enough for them. And that was the way it went with Leo DeOrsey from that evening onward. He couldn't have been straighter or more generous.

DeOrsey proposed that the book and magazine rights to their personal stories be put up for sale to the highest bidder. Bo

Sure enough, NASA approved the idea, the White House approved it, and DeOrsey started getting in touch with magazines, setting $500,000 as the floor for bids. The one solid offer—$500,000—came from Life, and DeOrsey closed the deal. Life had an excellent precedent for the decision. Few people remembered, but The New York Times had bought the rights to Charles Lindbergh's personal story before his famous transatlantic flight in 1927. It worked out splendidly for both parties. Having bought an exclusive, the Times devoted its first five pages to Lindbergh the day after his flight and the first sixteen the day after he returned from Paris, and all other major newspapers tried their best to keep up. In return for Life's exclusive rights to their personal stories and their wives', the astronauts would share the $500,000 evenly; the sum amounted to just under $24,000 a year for each man over the three years Project Mercury was scheduled to run, about $70,000 in all.

For junior officers with wives and children, used to struggling along on $5,500 to $8,000 a year in base pay, plus another $2,000 in housing and subsistence allowances and perhaps $1,750 in extra flight pay, the sum was barely even imaginable at first. It wasn't real. They wouldn't see any of it for months, in any case… Nevertheless, the goodies were the goodies. A career military officer denied himself and his family many things… with the understanding that when the goodies came along, they would be accepted and shared. It was part of the unwritten contract. The Life deal even provided them with foolproof protection against the possibility that their personal stories might become all-too-personal. Although written by Life, the stories would appear in the first person under their own by-lines… "by Gus Grissom"… "by Betty Grissom"… and they would have the right to eliminate any material they objected to. NASA, moreover, would have the same right. So there was nothing to keep the boys from continuing to come across as what they had looked like at the first press conference: seven patriotic God-fearing small-town Protestant family men with excellent backing on the home front.

Here in the summer of 1959 that was fine with Life and with the rest of the press, for that matter. Americans seemed to be deriving profound satisfaction from the fact that the astronauts turned the conventional notions of Glamour upside down. It was assumed—and the Genteel Beast kept underlining the point—that the seven astronauts were the greatest pilots and bravest men in America precisely because of the wholesome circumstances of their backgrounds: small towns, Protestant values, strong families, the simple life. Henry Luce, Life's founder and boss of bosses, had not played a major role, other than parting with the money, in making the astronaut deal, but eventually he came to look upon them as his boys. Luce was a great Presbyterian, and the Mercury astronauts looked like seven incarnations of Presbyterianism. This was no rural-American miracle, however. It was John Gle

Among the seven instant heroes John Gle

Two people who sometimes seemed to get impatient with Cooper were his Air Force comrades Gus Grissom and Deke Slayton. Grissom and Slayton had become great pals practically from the day they were selected as astronauts. They were from out of the same grim clay. Slayton was raised on a farm in western Wisconsin, up near the town of Sparta and the Elroy Sparta State Park Trail. He was taller than Grissom, more rugged, rather handsome, in fact, and quite intelligent, once you penetrated the tundra. When the subject was flying, his expression lit up, and he radiated confidence and had all the wit and charm and insights you could ask for. In other situations, however, he had Grissom's lack of patience for party ma

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