Susie Eisele Black
After Apollo 7, Donn and Harriet divorced. The gossip in Houston and the press created a circus atmosphere, but actually Donn was neck-and-neck with a fellow astronaut over who got the first divorce, with another astronaut coming in a close third. With all the media attention on Donn, it allowed the other two to slip out the back door. And, of course, those three were just the tip of the divorce iceberg.
Donn had been assigned to the backup crew for Apollo 10. Did he think it would turn into flying another Apollo mission, this time to the moon? I have no idea; he never mentioned it. I don’t think any of the guys ever mentioned it, although maybe they talked among themselves. I knew for myself that it wasn’t going to turn into a prime crew when it was clear his divorce was going through: all hell broke loose. I could see the way the other guys were acting toward Donn and that he wasn’t going to do anything. I think maybe he thought he could go to work, do what he was supposed to do, keep his head down, and it would blow over. But I also know that there were a few things that most astronauts got to do, and he wasn’t invited to do them. That hurt his feelings. It was not a nice time at all. I’m almost sure, had he been able to patch things up with Harriet, he would have flown in space again.
After his work on Apollo 10, Donn and I were married on August 1969, in Cocoa Beach, at the Holiday Inn. None of Donn’s so-called friends were there. Al Bishop, a very good friend of the astronauts, was there as best man. My friends were there, and people from the community were there. But it wasn’t a big crowd—I’d say thirty, at the most. It was on a Saturday, it wasn’t in Houston, but the main reason other astronauts did not show was that, at this point, the men were running scared. It was bizarre to me, being an outsider. I couldn’t believe people lived like that.
Chief astronaut Deke Slayton had asked me to continue seeing Donn until the Apollo 7 flight, to support him, which I thought was bizarre. Deke would call me up and ask if the guys could come up to my apartment and have a little party that night. So they’d all come over and do their dancing and drinking and whatever, usually about once every two weeks. Prior to that, I’d never had anything to do with the space program. I didn’t work for a contractor, didn’t know anything about it. So why didn’t they come to our wedding? I always imagined it was because they were pissed off. It was later explained to me that Donn and I had broken an unwritten rule: we were not supposed to fall in love. The astronauts’ after-hours pastimes at the Cape were supposed to be just diversions from work. When the flight was over, there was no longer any need for a diversion—it was home to Houston. Since I was never part of the female entourage down at the Cape who had casual flings with astronauts, I didn’t know this unwritten rule. It seems that it never occurred to them that you might fall in love with a woman and want to be with her. It took Donn a long time to get over that. Writing his book was probably a catharsis.
I left my home in Cape Canaveral with my daughter, Kristy, to live with Donn in Houston, in time for her to start the first grade at the beginning of the school year. I found Houston very unpleasant, and I was very unhappy. Prior to coming to Houston I’d had a very private life; NASA’s communal lifestyle was a shock to me.
I’m often asked about the group that has since been mythologized as the Astronaut Wives Club. When Donn and I were married and I moved down to Houston, astronaut wife Beth Williams, a widow by this point, was desperate for me to go to this get-together of the wives. “I guess,” I said—I was going to go. And then another astronaut’s girlfriend from the Cape whom I knew, she called me and said her boyfriend had wanted her to call and tell me, if I went, there would be a mass walkout by the other wives. It was going to be ugly. Well, that stopped that; I wasn’t there for anything like that. So I told Beth, I said, I’m not going to go—not in the middle of something like that. I mean, what is all that about?
I think that some of these women were caught up in all the space program publicity. Before their husbands became astronauts they’d had their little clubs, the Officer’s Wives Club or something, at some military base. That was what they were used to. They weren’t used to this—and they didn’t know how to act. So the wives gave their astronaut husbands a hard time about me. I think some of the husbands were also afraid I knew too much about their Cape activities and might spill the beans. Donn and I even went to a therapist. I’ll never forget it, the therapist said, “You know, Donn, you two are not paranoid—these people really don’t like her!”
Marilyn Lovell was one of the few astronaut wives who made the effort to be nice to me. Not to the point where I thought she and her husband were my best friends, or that they called us up to go out to dinner or anything, but she always treated me pleasantly. Jim Lovell and Donn had been classmates at Annapolis together, and I assumed he’d asked her to be nice to me. She was friendly, whereas Jane, astronaut Pete Conrad’s wife, wouldn’t even look at me. But later on, around 1980, we were all together in Washington DC at an affair hosted by President Reagan. We went to have lunch afterward, and Jane said, “I am sorry that I treated you the way I did. Pete told me I shouldn’t talk to you.” I was just stunned that a strong woman like her would allow herself to be told what to do.
It was at this very difficult time for us that Donn started writing, keeping notes on his observations and thoughts on what he called “Space Biz.” We had met novelist James Clavell at a big function after the premiere of the movie Marooned. He was so thrilled to meet an astronaut, and he invited us to lunch the next day. We sat there and talked, and he gave Donn the idea that he ought to write.
In May of 1970 Ed Cortright, the director of NASA’s Langley Research Center, asked Donn to come to Virginia and work on some research for the forthcoming Skylab space station. Donn said yes, so we moved to Virginia and rented a home in Williamsburg. Donn went up first and checked it out, and then we went up, scouted it out, said yes, rented a house, and we lived in Williamsburg for about a year and half. Donn drove his classic 1948 MG TC automobile to work. We also had a small plane, and we would fly around the East Coast making personal appearances for NASA and for our local congressman.
We made many friends among Donn’s colleagues at Langley and in the local area, and our lives became much happier. I still have very good friends from that happy time. In a different environment, without all the baggage, he could be considered a former Apollo astronaut in his own right. And because of Donn’s astronaut past, many people wanted to get to know him. When we first moved to Williamsburg, I heard a knock on the door one day and when I opened it there was a small boy, about five years old, asking if my daddy could come out and play. That Christmas, as a joke, I gave Donn a doormat that said “Go Away.”
Donn and I were just treated like we belonged there. When Walter Cronkite could not make a party, he would suggest that they call us, so we were invited to magnificent weekends in the capital, at old plantations out on the James River: we used to be written up in those Washington gossip columns. Folks from the local college would invite us to their house for dinner parties with famous authors. It was just a scream to live there.
In June of 1972, Donn resigned from NASA and the air force as a full colonel. We had decided that the Vietnam War was so ugly, and we sort of sided with the generals who thought the war might be ruining the military. Donn wrote to one of his Washington friends, who in turn wrote a letter to President Nixon’s chief of staff, saying Donn wanted to be involved in some job out of the country. After discussing which country, the president then appointed him as the country director of the Peace Corps for Thailand. By then we had added another Eisele to the family; our son Andrew was born in February 1972. In July we left Williamsburg to spend two years in Bangkok, when Andrew was only a few months old.
Our life took another path. Keeping tabs on two hundred and seventy-five volunteers was quite a job, and Donn did not have time to write his memoirs for a while. Donn’s arrival also created mixed feelings among the people he worked with. Everything gets political, it seems—there were groups of people on the left who felt a military man had no business being in the Peace Corps. Then there were people on the right who didn’t think he should be there either. But you know what, we got in country, and it was a life-turning event for the whole family. We just had this incredible experience.
We returned to Williamsburg in July 1974. We didn’t know where we’d go next, because we hadn’t put our heads together. Donn eventually decided what he wanted to do next in his life, but it took him a long time to figure that one out. In the meantime he worked more on a book about Apollo 7. His day-to-day activities were still somewhat overwhelming, however, so he could not sit down and write on a regular basis. At one point I taped a cartoon to his desk that I had found in the New Yorker. It was a picture of a man sitting at a desk and a woman standing behind him, and the caption read, “My first husband wrote five thousand words a day, rain or shine.” He thought it was funny, and we used it throughout our life when one of us would procrastinate over something.
I don’t know why Donn never finished his book. I know he worked on it in Houston, after we were married, then in Williamsburg, but not so much, and a little more in Thailand. He started other work and other projects. At one point, a man from Palm Beach who had once owned an airline asked Donn to help him start another one. Donn commuted to Washington DC for two years, and we made plans to move there. But eventually Donn realized that this very wealthy man was more interested in planning an airline than actually starting one. It was two years wasted that Donn could have used to finish his book.
I think Donn would have expanded his manuscript if he’d had more time. You have to understand, Donn was very bitter about his treatment. Not just with NASA management; the astronauts were all bitter with management. Donn was also very bitter at the way certain friends treated him. Some of them had been his classmates before NASA, and friends through thick and thin. But so were their wives. The terrible irony was, some of those who abandoned him had been the biggest rakes of them all.
Thankfully, over the years, Donn picked up his friendship with the “old Houston crowd.” We would attend astronaut reunions; there was at least one a year. By now, at least one astronaut each time would show up with a new wife; I was no longer an oddity. We went to France for one reunion, to Las Vegas, and to Richard Nixon’s California home. For a number of years, Al Worden hosted a Boys’ Club ball in Palm Beach every December. They were fun, as most astronauts have a great sense of humor, but we always returned home to our private life.
In the 1980s Donn made several trips to Japan and forged a business partnership with a man named Yoshi Yaminashi. The last trip he made to Japan was in December of 1987, for the opening of the Tokyo Space Camp. Donn was instrumental in getting that contract for Nippon Steel. It was a large event—and it was on that trip that he died of a heart attack.
I received a call from the U.S. Embassy telling me what had happened. It was very unexpected for me, and I had to arrange to get Donn’s remains home. In the end, Yoshi claimed the body, took it to his family temple, and had it cremated. He then brought the ashes to Washington, where I had them laid to rest with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery.
In going through Donn’s personal effects after he died, I found the notes and writings that he had made over the years. This was before people had personal computers, so they were all typed. I also found that he had kept all his space mementos, childhood mementos, plaques, and awards. Some had his name misspelled, some were meaningless to me. He had even kept his tests from elementary school. He was a real pack rat. It was fifty-seven years of a space hero’s life, but I didn’t know what to do with most of it except put it back in the box.
When the fortieth anniversary of Apollo 7 was held at the Frontiers of Flight museum in Dallas, Texas, in 2008, there was a wonderful weekend celebration. With the sad passing of Wally Schirra, my dear friend Walt Cunningham was the only crew member left alive to attend. Standing in front of the Apollo 7 spacecraft, Neil Armstrong gave a wonderful, moving speech. He acknowledged the importance of Apollo 7, explaining Wally, Walt, and Donn’s special contribution to the moon program. And after forty years, with the NASA administrator presiding over the ceremony, the space agency awarded each of the Apollo 7 crew the NASA Distinguished Service Medal. I wished that Donn had still been alive to accept it. I accepted the award in his name. “I always considered Wally, Walt, and Donn heroes,” I told the assembled press. “After forty years, it is nice to know that NASA does too.”
In 2005 NASA wrote me a letter and told me that all of the Apollo astronauts or their widows would be given a moon rock to be placed in a museum or other public institution of their choice. Since Donn and I had spent our last years together in Fort Lauderdale in Florida, I picked the Broward County Main Library. I wanted a venue that was free and open to anyone who was interested in seeing it. The library has done a wonderful job planning programs around the moon rock display and arranging for school children to see it. The facility continually shows a film about the flight of Apollo 7; a friend of mine who works there tells me she sees Donn every day as she heads to and from her office.
Another ceremony to honor Donn took place some years earlier, in 1997: the inauguration of Donn into the Astronaut Hall of Fame. My teenage son Andy went with me, and I asked him to take part in the ceremonies too. When they called Donn’s name we went onstage and former astronaut Alan Shepard, who was at that time the president of the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation, gave us a plaque. I thanked Alan and the audience and said I was sorry that Donn was not there to receive it personally. But Andy went to the microphone and said, “What took so long?” To say that Donn’s children were angry and hurt at their father’s flight being ignored would be an understatement. Through all of this, people have always forgotten that it is the kids who suffer, because it is the kids who carry the legacy. I am really so sorry for all of the bitterness they went through. The 2008 event in Dallas did a lot to heal that, and I hope that this book will further give Donn some long-due recognition for his hard work and also share his unique insights on the birth of the moon program.
I think a large part of the reason this book needs to be published is to defend his honor. Do you know how many books that have been written with Donn and me in there, that not one author asked us about when they were writing theirs? There have also been television dramatizations I have watched with my mouth hanging open. One had Donn being with me the night before the launch, so that he was late for his own flight. That’s not fair, because it is a lie, and the public will think it’s what happened. Donn’s sons were watching too. When we got together afterward, they said, “That wasn’t my dad.” I know all of Donn’s children will be happy that this book puts straight so many inaccuracies.
I want to thank Francis French, who came up with the idea of trying to make sense of Donn’s writings. Francis found Donn a mystery when it came to the history of the space program, and we emailed for many months when he was writing In the Shadow of the Moon. When I later invited him to come and stay at my home, I showed him the many boxes of Donn’s papers I had been carting around for two decades. He did a brilliant job editing Donn’s memoirs, and when he sent the first draft to me and I read it, tears came to my eyes. It was like Donn was speaking from the grave. He’s been gone for a quarter of a century, and he probably wrote his drafts thirty-five to forty years ago, off and on. But it was like Donn was talking to me. Ever since, I often think about Donn and our lives together. We had a nice life, a very nice, interesting life.
My thanks too to Amy Shira Teitel, who has told the story of the wider space program to put Donn’s words in historical context. Both she and Francis have done all of their writing and editing for free, so that the proceeds of this book can help a good cause. I am touched by and grateful for their selflessness, and so are our children.
I hope you find the book both a fascinating look into the very first Apollo flight and into the unique personality of my much-missed late husband. No matter what people say, they’ll never be able to take the legacy of being an Apollo astronaut away from Donn. Never, ever, ever.