Friday, August 17, 1984

LYNDON B. JOHNSON SPACE CENTER, HOUSTON

The questions came drifting out of a sea of lights so intense that they seemed to bake York’s face dry.

“How does it feel to be on the crew?” “What about the guys you beat out?” “Who will be first on the surface?” “What’s it like in space?…”

The three of them — chaperoned by Joe Muldoon and Rick Llewellyn, head of NASA’s Public Affairs Office — sat on a rickety podium, with the NASA logo emblazoned behind them, and a Revell model of a Columbia MEM on the table before them. The briefing room in the Public Affairs Office was packed, and in front of their table there was what the Old Heads called a goat fuck, an unseemly scramble of microphones and camera lenses, pushed into the faces of the astronauts.

Rarely in York’s life had people been interested enough to ask her to explain herself, her background, her motives, her hopes and fears. And now everything about her was significant: everything that had happened in her life, every aspect of her personality.

It was probably going to last forever. And she found she hated it.

She envied Phil Stone, with his neat, crew-cut good looks and his hint of a Midwestern twang — the stereotypical astronaut hero — for the grace with which he fielded the dumbest, most repetitive questions. And the press had already taken Ralph Gershon to their hearts for his infectious grins — the glamorous, hell-raising bachelor spaceman — and for his wisecracking, and the hint of danger, of ambiguity about him. Even if he did make Rick Llewellyn visibly nervous every time he opened his mouth. And even if there was, as far as York was concerned, an undertow of racism about the patronizing affection with which Gershon was treated.

And that left York: in her own view, the least equipped to handle the media pressure, but the one on whom most interest was focused. And all for the wrong reasons.

It had started the day after her place in the crew was announced. All the outlets used the same ancient stock NASA photo of her, holding up an outdated biconic MEM model. “This quiet, intent and dedicated scientist…” “Redhead Natalie York is, at 37, unmarried and without children…” “We asked beautician Marcia Forbes what advice she would give America’s premier spacewoman. Well, to begin, with those eyebrows, you know…” “This mop-haired 35-year-old native of L.A….” “…A crop-haired brunette of medium height, Natalie York is said to be disconcerted by the prospect of publicity…” “Her dark, close-cropped hair and her Latin good looks make Natalie a woman of glamour and mystery, but a natural for the role of America’s first woman on Mars…”

Hair, eyebrows, and teeth. It drove her crazy.

Already they’d tracked down her mother, who was loving the attention, and Mike Conlig and his new family, who weren’t.