MovieChat Forums > The Astronaut Wives Club (2015) Discussion > Question About episode 6 (spoilers)

Question About episode 6 (spoilers)

posted 9 years ago by crackie5445
4 replies | jump to latest

Maybe i missed something, but did gus grissom have an affair with that woman or was she just some random fan?

They guys made out like he didn't, but when confronted by his wife he said nothing.

[–] misssyron 9 years ago

According to an article dated June 30, 2013 in The Telegraph on the book, The Astronaut Wives Club, Betty Grissom knew Gus had girlfriends, but tried to blot it out of her mind.

Based on that, I think it's possible that women was a girlfriend who was possessive and thought she was entitled to the privileges of a wife. In today's world, she might be termed "a stalker" and become a threat to the family. Evidently NASA deemed the woman a threat and provided Secret Service protection for the Grissoms.

I think the other astronauts regarded the incident as par for the course.....most of them also had girlfriends.

Here's the link to the article in The Telegraph.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/10150092/Drink-debauchery-and-despair-astronauts-wives-lift-lid-on-grim-reality-behind-the-smiling-Nasa-space-launches.html

[–] wab-3 9 years ago

The writers are being really schizophrenic about the infidelity, and I don't know why. First, they set it up as if all the guys except Glenn are fooling around. Then they backtrack and show Carpenter being faithful (which he may or may not have been), Cooper born-again-faithful as an astronaut wanting to save his marriage and now Gus as possibly faithful as well. The source book and various other sources make it very clear that others besides Shepard cheated on their wives, although it's difficult to pin down who and when.

[–] kingg-2 9 years ago

All except Glenn cheated, at least a bit. A bit being a one-nighter with a Cocoa Cookie or with a girl elsewhere.

Some cheated a lot more, i.e. had a girlfriend on the side. A mistress, more or less. I know that a lot of people - especially women - don't see a difference, but to guys who do it, there is. A one-nighter is sport sex basically, with no relationship and no real feelings. A girlfriend, that's a relationship, some some level of feelings.

This episode brought that to light. Did Gus have sex with other women? Yes. Did he have relationships with other women? Unknown. This episode demonstrates that sometimes one side of an affair thinks of it differently than the other side.

[–] wab-3 9 years ago

It's not that clear-cut at all. We've got a lot of sources alleging about infidelity committed by the Mercury 7, but many are vague:

--The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe's book, first raised the issue of infidelity, but did not name names, IIRC.

--The Right Stuff, Phil Kaufmann's movie adaption of the book, strongly implies that all of the 7 except for Carpenter and Glenn cheated on their wives. However, the movie is highly fictionalized.

--Then comes a whole host of histories and memoirs, including a couple by members of the 7, which discuss or admit to infidelity, but do so vaguely. These were written while most of the astronauts were still alive so may have been inhibited by the threat of libel suits. Plus Betty Grissom had devoted herself to deifying Gus and was known to be nutty and litigious.

--Then we get the source history for this series, The Astronaut Wives Club, which treats the issue as a foregone conclusion but isn't really that specific as to who did what when. I read it last spring and to my recollection the book only specifically identifies Al Shepard as a philanderer during the Mercury period. I believe the book strongly hints that Gordo Cooper was as well but maybe somebody who has a copy at hand can cite specifics. After Mercury, there are a bunch of divorces, with the strong implication that the men cheated on their wives before divorcing them.

--Finally, we get this series, derived from the AWC book, which is so heavily fictionalized and contradictory that I don't think you can use it as a source for anything.

So what do we know for sure? That Al cheated and John Glenn didn't. Any other specifics are guesses. We don't know that Gus cheated. Not even the wives necessarily knew for sure, except for Louise Shepard. The one person who would have known the specifics and wrote about the issue was Deke Slayton. His memoir is bluntly honest in many respects, and though he doesn't name names he seems to corroborate Phil Kaufmann's depiction that Glenn and maybe Carpenter were the only two who weren't fooling around during the Mercury program.