The Last of the Original “Astronaut Wives”
By: Randy Cassingham
Tags: 1960s, NASA, Intelligence, Women, Astronauts

The Last of the Original “Astronaut Wives”

Rene Carpenter was ahead of her time, and highly accomplished in her own right.

Rene & Scott Carpenter with their children at a presidential show and tell at the White House on 5 June 1962. (Photo: JFK Presidential Library)

Rene Carpenter — the wife of America’s fourth man into space, Scott Carpenter — was extremely supportive of her husband’s career, but wasn’t content with the subservient role NASA assigned her.

Born in Iowa in 1928, Rene’s mother — who had a job, which was fairly unusual in the 1920s — had divorced when Rene was 2, which was also unusual for the era. Her new husband adopted the 8-year-old Rene, which she pronounced “Reen” throughout her life, and the family moved to Boulder, Colorado.

After graduating from Boulder High School, she met Scott Carpenter, and they married in Boulder in 1948. Carpenter, about 3 years her senior, had grown up in Boulder, and was friends with a classmate at University Hill Elementary School: Anne … who later became my mother-in-law. My wife remembers the Carpenters, and that Rene was “a sweet lady.”

This toy train was made by Scott Carpenter in 1934, while he was a fourth-grader at University Hill Elementary in Boulder, Colo. He gleefully presented it to a favored classmate, Anne — who became my mother in law. It is now owned by her daughter, Kit Cassingham. The model was clearly inspired by the Burlington Zephyr, which Scott Carpenter may have seen in Denver before its record-setting run from Denver to Chicago on 26 May 1934. (Photo by the author)

Scott became a pilot in the U.S. Navy — Rene pinned his aviator wings on him upon his graduation from flight school in April 1951. He was a good pilot: his skipper recommended him for the Navy Test Pilot school. He did well there, too: in 1959 he was selected as one of the “Original Seven” U.S. astronauts.

That meant Rene Carpenter became a member of an equally exclusive club: “Astronaut’s Wife” …with all the associated media glare: Life magazine had “exclusive rights” to the “personal stories” of the astronauts and their families, while other outlets competed to get their own photos and stories.

As the seven husbands were in training, “Five of us built houses at once, in an area 30 miles below Houston,” Rene said in a 1974 interview. “And, independently, without discussing it, we all built them with no windows in the front, and with walled courtyards, as if we knew what was coming.”

Standing Out

The Washington Post described Rene Carpenter as a “striking platinum blonde” — but she was anything but dumb. Rene encouraged her husband’s career: when the letter from NASA came telling Scott to report for fitness testing “by Monday,” he was the intelligence officer aboard the USS Hornet (which would later figure in several Apollo missions). Rene opened the letter, called NASA Manpower Director Dr. Allen Gamble, and blurted, “We volunteer!” Gamble was surprised, but held the spot for him.

Ms Carpenter wasn’t like others in the “Astronaut Wives Club”. Every one of the early astronauts were male, and married; their wives were expected to uphold the ideal of the perfect wife: coiffed, supportive — and to stay in the background, bringing up the children. After all, America was now in The Space Age! Yet Rene stood out from the others, starting with her looks.

When the seven wives were featured on the cover of Life’s 21 September 1959 issue, they put Rene in the center of the photo — “no doubt because the editors regarded her as prettiest,” author Tom Wolfe wrote in The Right Stuff, his best-selling book about the early space program. “As far as the wives were concerned,” Wolfe wrote, “their outlook was the same as that of officers’ wives generally, only more so. The main thing was not to say or do anything that reflected badly upon your husband.” Rene was called (in news articles!) the “blue-eyed blonde,” “shapely,” or “a dish.”

But with her overflowing Uncommon Sense, she was clearly at least as smart as her husband.

“She was keenly alert to everything going on in the space program,” said writer Thomas Mallon, “from its orbital mechanics to its rivalries.” He said Wolfe got a lot of material for his book from Rene. More tellingly, Mallon says, when he interviewed NASA Flight Operations Director Christopher Kraft Jr., he said he mentioned he was friends with Rene Carpenter. “He lit up with delight and admiration, exclaiming, ‘She should have been picked for the [astronaut] program!’”

“I don’t care what NASA says,” Rene said: she went to Cape Canaveral to watch her husband launch into space, rather than watch on TV as NASA wanted. (Image: Google’s Life Archive)

When Scott became the fourth American in space in May 1962, Rene insisted on going to the Cape to watch the launch in person, rather than on TV as the wives were encouraged to do. “I don’t care what NASA says,” she said, according to her daughter, Kris Stoever.

Rene also followed in her mother’s footsteps in having an outside job: she was a writer. Her column “A Woman, Still” was syndicated to numerous newspapers starting in 1965 — but not in the Washington Post, even though she was friends with Executive Editor Ben Bradlee. “Ben wouldn’t buy it,” Rene laughed years later. “He said, ‘It’s not good enough.’”

She still was allowed to write her own story for Life: “As a bride I was assured by glowing advertisements that I would spend my hours fingering the latest sterling silverware pattern and filling linen closets to overflowing,” she wrote. Instead, “I learned to give birth alone, care for sick babies alone and wait at the end of a hundred almost forgotten runways for a plane to touch down again.”

What, reality?! Yet Life published it, probably to the knowing nods of millions of long-suffering American housewives.

Astronaut Barbie (1965) has a certain resemblance to the extra-gorgeous Rene Carpenter, and may have been modeled after her: compare this with the White House and magazine cover photos above. (Photo: Mattel)

After Scott Carpenter’s flight, Rene and the children rode with him in the New York City ticker-tape parade. “You can’t imagine what 5 million people looked like if you weren’t in New York that day,” she said in that 1974 interview. “From the airport to city hall, hanging from buildings, packed into Wall Street, laughing and crying.” She had seen “the Kennedy hysteria, but this was something else. They treated those men as if they were super human.” Yet she knew of their failings first-hand: they were all most definitely human.

The Last of Her Kind

Like many astronaut couples subjected to the stresses of those early years, in 1972 the Carpenters divorced. She kept her name, even when she later remarried, as she had been using it professionally for years.

After her divorce, Rene was invited by Washington Post publisher Kay Graham, who also owned the local CBS-TV affiliate, to develop and host Everywoman, a nightly TV interview show which covered “feminist” topics like natural childbirth and sexism. It ran until 1976.

But she bristled at the Washington Post referring to her in an article about the show as the “ex-wife of the astronaut.”

She blasted the paper: “I have lived totally apart from ‘the astronaut’ for six years. I am a single whole person — secure and happy in that status. I would like to be recognized as Me, unencumbered by hyphens or gratuitous references to the past, and I am convinced I speak for a growing number of women who are newly responsive and aware of their own unique identities.”

It wasn’t the only indignity she suffered after she firmly became Me. The book The Astronaut Wives Club by Lily Koppel came out in 2013, and was adapted into a TV series by ABC. “I really see them as America’s first reality stars,” Koppel said in a promotional tour interview. “These women who were unknown military wives in the background, married to test pilots, obviously had to be pretty brave to even be married to a man with that kind of high-risk job. But all of a sudden, America’s looking to them as model housewives, and they’re going to have a role throughout the space race of presenting the perfect American family to the rest of the world.”

Rene Carpenter especially hated 2015 TV adaptation. “Every segment of the show is fiction! Every segment!” she complained.

With the death of astronaut wife Annie Glenn in May, Rene was the last survivor of the Original Seven astronauts and their wives. She died from congestive heart failure in a Denver hospital on July 24, at 92.