Before Jet Pilot was released, the Air Force sent me to New York to attend the opening of a British movie called Breaking the Sound Barrier. It wasn't about me; supposedly, it was based on the life of Geoffrev De Havilland, Jr., who was killed flying the tailless Swallow while trying to break Mach 1. It was a good and very realistic action picture. They used a World War II Spitfire to break the barrier, which was amusing because that airplane wouldn't go faster than .75 Mach in a power dive. When the actor discovered that his stick froze at Mach 1, instead of pulling back, he pushed the stick forward and it somehow released. Any pilot who really tried that stunt would've drilled himself into the ground, but it worked as a dramatic moment in the picture, and I thoroughly enjoyed myself.
When the lights came on, I realized that people seated around me thought they had watched a true story. I overheard one guy say to his wife, "Where in hell was Uncle Sam?" I said to him, "Hey, that was only a movie. We broke the barrier not the damned British. And I'm the guy who did it." I might have saved my breath. That movie was a hit, and many who saw it believed it was a true story. Even the new Secretary of the Air Force believed the part about reversing the controls. Secretary Finletter stopped me at a Washington dinner and asked me if that's how I had done it in the X-1. I told him, "No, sir. If I tried that, they would've found the X-1's nose poking out the ground in China."
The public really didn't understand the concept of the sound barrier, but the press description of a brick wall in the sky made me seem like a young Captain Marvel. Sometimes I just winced reading stories that credited me with feats that were wildly exaggerated. Glennis saved them all, filling big scrapbooks, but she'd get mad watching me get mad reading them. "Boy, you're hard to please," she said. I told her, "It's hard enough being a test pilot without dragging around a ten foot reputation that just isn't true. Everyone expects miracles from me and that's a perfect way to get killed."
That ten-foot reputation stuck with me over more than twenty years of my Air Force career, creating a lot of jealousy and enemies. The Air Force insisted on putting me up on a pedestal, and there was no lack of volunteers trying to knock me down. A few of them came damned close to wrecking my career. That was part of the price of having been singled out ahead of the pack to fly the X-1. Being famous got me nothing in the way of promotions or better assignments, but among the intensely competitive pilots in flight test, there were some who would never forgive me for taking that historic Mach 1 flight. The Secretary of the Air Force and the Chief of Staff knew me and called me by my first name, the mail and speech assignments kept rolling in, and powerful politicians asked me for my autograph. Yet, my family and I had gone from bad to worse in our living conditions out on the desert. We lived no better than a damned sheepherder-maybe worse. And I was still outranked by all the senior test pilots. As far as I know, none of those jokers at Pancho's were jealous of that.
The acclaim didn't change Chuck in the least. We had never really discussed how the sound barrier might affect our lives, which was just as well because, in terms of our home life, I'd have never known it happened. He was gone more making speeches, which he really didn't enjoy very much, although ultimately he became quite good at it. Chuck was Chuck, and fame didn't mean a dog's ear. It didn't interest him. What made him tick were the things that did interest him. Fishing, for example. He loved going out on a boat in the ocean, or frogging on the Mud River, or stream-and-lake fishing, or backpacking in to inaccessible lakes and golden trout fishing- hundreds of ways to fish. Salmon fishing, crabbing-as long as it was challenging and different. Fame meant making appearances. That meant wearing a tie. He hated that.
Well, he was wearing a tie a lot going around the country for the Air Force, and he was bitter about the situation. We had been out on the desert more than two years, and the Air Force still insisted on carrying him as TDY (temporary duty), which meant that we were ineligible for base housing. Meanwhile, I became pregnant with Sharon not long after he broke the sound barrier. Soon there would be five of us squeezed in a one-bedroom adobe. We searched all over, but the best we could find was a weathered old dump forty miles from the base, at the Wagon Wheel Ranch. The house was ramshackle and the wind whistled through every crack, but it had two bedrooms. On winter nights out on the desert the temperature dropped well below freezing, and we darned near froze from exposure. We drew our water from a windmill pump, and our nearest neighbor was sixteen miles away. The only road to our front door was an impossibly bumpy dirt road that ended at an abandoned silver mine. I lived in terror that I'd run out of bread or milk out there, because the nearest store meant an hour-and-a-half round trip. It took Chuck nearly that long to commute back and forth to work every day.
God, it was awful and it really put a strain on both of us. I was just stuck. Pancho had given us a Dalmatian pup, and one day my two little boys wandered off while my back was turned; they got away from me. My heart was in my mouth because if those kids got lost out on the desert, that was it. I ran out into the scrub and Joshua trees, panicked because anything low to the ground was lost in that rolling terrain. But then I saw our puppy's white tail wagging way out there. That's how I found them.
I got so tired not having any adult contact all day long. It was just me, the kids, and a radio. There was no TV yet, or I'm sure I would've become a game show addict. Chuck came home from work to be greeted by an irritable wife sick of hearing baby talk all day. I wanted him to talk to me about anything, I didn't care what, as long as they were adult words. But Chuck just isn't a talker. He can't make small talk and I didn't understand airplane talk. He certainly wasn't interested in my home decoration or my music (we had an upright piano). Normally we understood each other without a whole lot of dialogue. We could tell at a glance whether one of us was mad or glad about something. He knew I was in a tough spot, so he kept asking me to go with him to all those public functions he had to attend, but that wasn't my style. Being in public that way was a strain, and I really didn't enjoy it.
Despite all that Chuck was doing for the Air Force, it was hard to believe that there could be any Air Force family living less high off the hog than we were. One weekend, we went to Pancho's for a family barbecue. I was big and pregnant, and our two boys went off and played by themselves. They drank from some dirty Coke bottles and got trench mouth. Their gums were red and swollen and they could've lost their little teeth. They needed penicillin shots every three hours for three days. Charlotte Wiehrdt, the wife of one of the test pilots, was a registered nurse, and, God bless her, she came out to the house every three hours to give those kids their shots. Their little butts looked like pin cushions, but their teeth were saved.
Chuck, of course, had full hospitalization, but the rest of us could only use the base hospital in an emergency. So, when the time came to deliver Sharon, I went to the town of Mojave, where there was a fourteen-bed hospital, and the baby was born there. It snowed the entire time I was in the hospital, but it let up by the time Chuck came to take me home. We got halfway home, driving out in the middle of the boonies, when the wind picked up, piling huge snowdrifts across the road. Chuck tried to plow through it, but it was no use. We sat there for several hours with our new baby, running the car heater intermittently to keep from freezing. We were becoming real concerned, but fortunately, so was my mother, who was staying with the boys. We were long overdue at home, so she called the air police on base. They sent up search helicopters, which quickly found us because Chuck had thought to keep the car roof clear of snow.