Riding Rockets - Mike Mullane [32]
What was it about the women in their flight suits? It wasn’t like the clothing flattered their figures. NASA ordered them off the shelf. The nuns of my high school would have loved them. They were baggy in all the right places, effectively neutering the female form. But in them, Judy, Rhea, and Anna stole the audience. The flight suits seemed to transform them into fantasy creatures like Barbarella or Cat Woman or Bat Girl. If Madonna had walked into a room in a jewel-bedecked Prada special, dripping Tiffany diamonds, and stood next to a coverall-clad Judy, Rhea, or Anna, the Material Girl would have paled to “ordinary.” Everybody, men and women alike, wanted to be seen with the flight suit–dressed women and pose for photos with them. Occasionally they would be so bothered and exhausted by the attention, they would use us men as human shields. At one of the parties I was standing with Dale Gardner, Norm Thagard, and a few others when Judy Resnik ducked behind our backs and whispered, “Close it up. I don’t want that press guy to find me.” A moment later we saw the stalker, pen and pad in hand, searching the room for his quarry. He eventually camped out at the exit to the ladies’ room, expecting Judy had fled there.
Eating an uninterrupted meal in public in a flight suit quickly became impossible for the TFNG females. Patrons would approach them and ask for autographs, scrounging for any scrap of paper, including napkins, sugar packets, or bank deposit slips from the back of their checkbooks. At one meal the entire kitchen staff came out to meet Judy. The proud establishment owner, a large Italian woman, fawned over her as if she were royalty while ignoring me and the other men as if we were Judy’s foot servants. In jest I interrupted their love fest and said, “Hey, what am I…chopped liver?” Moments later the woman brought out a plate of exactly that, raw chopped liver, and dropped it in front of me. Judy laughed. So did I. I like a good joke even when it is on me.
Besides the open bars at our soirées, there were other attractions for the males…young, beautiful women. Lots of them. At a Florida event one of the coarser TFNGs observed, “Mullane, look at this party. It’s a potpourri of pussy.” I had been in enough officers’ clubs in my life to know that aviator wings had more babe-attracting power than Donald Trump’s twelve-inch wallet. The Navy SEAL insignia had the same effect. One SEAL told me that some of the young women who frequented their officers’ club were nicknamed Great White Sharks because they had swallowed so much SEAL meat. The male TFNGs were learning there was an even more powerful pheromone than jet-jockey wings and the SEAL insignia: the title astronaut. The fact that none of us had been any closer to space than an airline flight attendant didn’t seem to matter. To the space groupies the title was good enough. We males found ourselves surrounded by quivering cupcakes. Some were blatantly on the make, wearing spray-on clothes revealing high-beam nipples, and smiles that screamed, “Take me!” The few bachelor TFNGs must have experienced some Zen-like ecstasy. In fighter pilot talk, they operated in a “target-rich environment.” They should have just donned a full-body latex suit and gotten a “please take a number” dispenser.
Even the gold bands on the fingers of us married TFNGs were no deterrent to many of these women. They were equal opportunity groupies. Of course it was easy to see who was taking advantage of the situation. During the head count on the bus to return to a hotel, some MIAs would be noted. “He said not to wait for him. He got a ride.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet he got a ride” would be the rebuttal and a wave of snickers would follow.
It was also easy to see who was traumatized by the body swapping…the post-docs. I doubt any of them had ever met a married colleague with red-blasted “all-nighter” eyes, trailing the odor of alcohol and sex as he exited a motel room with a smiling young woman. Sensing their shock, Rick Hauck spoke to them on a bus returning from a meet-the-astronauts mingle.