one of his gemini flights, marilyn found out she was pregnant and she hid her pregnancy from jim for a few months which is pretty remarkable until he finally found out and she said i am sorry, i didn't want you to get bumped from the flight. cheese said good idea, we should keep it secret for a longer. this is just a taste of the astrowives lives. i would like to open up the discussion to questions now because it is such a rich topic and i could talk a little more about what it was like going into these historic figures's living rooms and what it was like getting to know them as well. if anyone has questions, please do line up.

>> in your book, you talk about one of the episodes on one of the lunar landings where the camera didn't work and there was virtually sort of a cover-up because they didn't want to show that. i wonder if you could go into that. >> one of the most exciting things, of course, about walking on the moon, being on the moon for the guys and everybody watching back at home, that was what was so incredible about the apollo program. even for someone like me who is one of the wives once asked me when i went to interview her, where were you when we landed on the moon? how old were you? i said jo, i think i was moon dust. i wasn't born yet. whenever you become fascinated with this subject, you can go there with the guys. all you have to do is look at the youtube footage, television

footage they filmed. the incident you were just talking about was apollo 12, the second mission to the moon. alan bean had this television cameras a burgling to use to chronicle their journey and he by accident turned it into the sun, so it was burned out. the only transmission they were able to share with the public in real-time was the voices of the astronauts which are going into the wives's homes versus on the squawk boxes which are these baby intercom like space-age device is all the wives had at home but the networks are flipping out. we are not going to get our moon footage and we had big swaths of time allowed for it. what they did was nasa had some mockups of the moon where the guys would practice going through their routines for when

they were up there so they outfitted some actors in space suits and had them sort of manic what pete conrad and alan bean or beeano as his friends call him or doing on the moon and it has only fuel the conspiracy theories that anyone who has anything to do with nasa including the wives think are absolutely ludicrous. i would like to tell you all how i came to write this book and a little bit about getting to know these women today. of course i am a writer, i live in new york with my husband who is also a writer, in the front row. our lives are composed on a daily level of thinking about stories, thinking about ideas for great stories. this isn't something you can manufacture.

inspiration has to hit. i have to admit at that time i was quite into the show madmen, we were having a carrot -- a tv marathon watching it and i love the 60s time period, my grandmother used to wear pulitzer dresses, we just bought this big soda book of the moon landings with the norman mailer text of a fire on the moon. and i was looking through these pictures of neil armstrong on the lunar surface, buzz aldrin and his sort of marshmallow space suit and just having sort of a tomboy moment because these are pretty male heroic images, until i turn a page and i am hit with this burst of color. ..

and a sort of continue to support each other through triumph and tragedy. one of the sweetest things about the connection of the wives is many of them when i met them they wore a little gold bracelets with a tiny golden whistle on it and that's one of their symbols we will be there

for you and it was a matter of winning over these women's trust. they were always very protective of nasa, of their husbands even if they were later after their husbands back from the moon divorced because astronauts and their wives did divorce after the apollo program and i see it as a casualty of the incredible amount of pressure that was on these families to come for them and tform andto just work aroune rigorous hours. out of 30 couples only seven marriages survived. so in many ways as they pointed out, there relationships have endured longer than the marriages. it outlasted them as well. there were people that were more difficult to get to know their

mothers. at the beginning everyone was sort of whistling is betty going to talk to you? i don't think that he is going to talk to you. she doesn't come to our meetings and so i was nervous because she was someone important to talk to and sure enough i got a lovely letter from her. she doesn't talk on the phone much because of her hearing that she said when you come to houston please come to my home and it was one of these interviews that i expected it to be about two hours and when we went back to her house about 10:00 at night i told her i think i should go to the hotel and get some sleep and come back tomorrow morning. and she was just fun loving andd honest and had the kind of memory she would've plucked out conversations that she had back in the day.

they were high school sweethearts like many of the astronauts and their wives. her story is a tragic one. of course during the mercury program, his capsule thinks so he is given a bad rap for that position of his and from the early days of course way men always had to deal with the pressure of what if he doesn't come back. which is you don't talk about the danger especially with your husband coming to don't talk about the danger with your friends because it was seen as a james many of them have superstitions and my favorite woman i got to know during the project had a superstition i think we can all probably relates to which is pete's pillow had to be perfectly

smooth on his site of the bed in his closet door had to be closed because if she did it, she felt like something wrong could happen and this is just a reflection of the fear these women had to digest and live with. goss always told betty that he didn't like her wearing black and she felt the only time you should ever wear black was to a funeral and purposefully she didn't end up wearing black to his funeral people to listen to something happens to me i want you to have a party. so early on she promised him, she said okay i will have a party. he is one of the men that died during the apollo fire, and this was the first large-scale tragedy when the men perish in a capsule it catches fire on the

ground and this is a very revealing part of what these men went through because it was excruciating. the way that they reported was relatively new lows in the official man always had to tell the wife her closest friends are always called before tuesday something bad has happened out there. i want you to go to her house right now that the women knew they were not allowed to use say anything they just had his agent told the official word could arrive, so very difficult. in the case of petty end o betto other wives in the fire, debbie ended up saving nasa's -- sueing nasa's and as a result she was basically ostracized from

together as bill by the other astronauts and the astronauts lives for not touting the party line for going against the company organization. pat weitz was a tragic story. she never really got over her husband after apollo one and when they were planning a reunion years later she actually committed suicide and they saw her as a final tragedy of the apollo one fire. so a lot of heartache in this story. but just incredible american moments that were not seen as necessarily input to report back

then because we were not as focused on the fact as behind every great man is a great form in or behind every moonwalk or there is a strong woman waiting on earth and it is just a whole another sort of constellation perspective on what it took to get to the moon. do we have any of your questions? >> it could be your next book three of how do the children fare in that kind of upbringing? >> as i talked to many of the kids it was sort of growing up in the cradle of the american dream, green lawns, a pool that was shaped like the space capsules like the -- the kids

almost remember fondly those were the days our mother would lock us out of the house and they don't come home until dinner. you are giving me a headache and it was great because we would ride our bikes and go to the pool and that is sort of the memory. but i think it's difficult having a father who is a hero but often and absentee father because they wer were a way trag so often. one of the kids remembered it was sort of strange. it was like a dad wouldn't be home a lot suddenly he would be very end of the magazine would be there and we would be doing a photo shoot out on the swing. we never did this in real life. it's probably at a lot of kids in hollywood at the old place

now. their lives were made almost reality shows so there was dealing with that and i will share one more funny anecdote which is the wives were always sort of kidding and complaining they had to drag their kids into watch the space launches, johnny would rather be watching star trek. but within your dad is doing some important stuff. well my best friends dad is an astronauastronaut and lives acre street, those are engineers over there, and this was the world that was normal to them and the wives tried very hard to keep normal and grounded. >> you kind of you who do to help their lives changed after the program and i was wondering if you could share their thoughts on what was it like when that ended? do they feel like it should continue and like there was a

sense among these families at that point? everyone was sad when mixing ended the program and these wives who i see today and i think in history they will continue to be seen and i've told this to them as a sort of pioneer space women. they were the pioneers. their husbands were doing something we had never done before. just the moments of going out in your backyard as jane conrad remembered when her house .-full-stop there walking around on the moon and she -- the house just cleared out and she had all of the wives over for a party about 5:30 in the morning she wandered out by the pool and just look a looked at the moon t of stared at it and i think we can all think this when we look at the mood like we went up

there as a country and as human beings. but she said she remembered when she was a little girl how she used to look forward to man in the moon and she said this is trippy. my husband is the man in the moon and for this one moment she had this mystical feeling of clarity. this is the late 60s. people are into that. she said it basically vanished in a moment and then she was going back inside to do the dishes. but to get back to justify fallout after the apollo program, i think the most prominent example is looking at buzz aldrin and his wife. like many they had a hard time coming back from the moon after the families and the crew members into their lives would go on these fabulous tours

especially after apollo 11 they went all over the world presenting moon rocks and little cases to the clean of thing cleg going, etc., the heads of state and while they were on this tour she shared her diary with me that she kept and she starts seeing buzz spiraling out of control. he's been outspoken about his own alcoholism and depression he built with after coming back from the moon and that is something that changed her life. they ended up getting a divorce and they have three kids. she has an entry in her diary i think our lives will return to normal and he looked at her and said i've been to the moon. nothing is ever going to be the same. and i think that is true for a

lot of the families. >> you mentioned how you flipped a page in a magazine and a story came to life. if you have a moment at the end of the red leather and i hear -- diary what caused you to flip their? cynic i will save that for the moment and please -- >> i haven't read the book yet but i look forward to reading it. i don't know the ages of the women that you are referring to but in your research, did the idea come up with a conversation about the commercialization of space travel and would any of them ever consider the galactic would they do that themselves? to ask about going into space back in the six he sispa and

lots of time with life magazine of course, if you have these articles about we are going to be putting up a couple of the astronaut had this sort of crackpot scheme and root beer stands when we colonized, so yes someone like a former tough marine said i would have gone up there in a heartbeat and the early pilot who ended up flying in the powder puff derby she would have been there in a moment but some of them are like are you kidding i want to stay down here with my feet on the ground and of course they all hope we will continue to explore and push the envelope as their husband used to say. i will just mention very deeply

the red leather diary, my first book because i think it reflects on how i wanted to talk this kind of story. i grew up in chicago. and it was a new york guy in a city girl. i was in new york with that density of people walking around looking at these old buildings into these windows lit up and i just sort of naïve, just to be an incredible amount of untold stories but there are and how everybody has a story and somehow i just wanted to be able to reveal some of those distant stars. so very serendipitously i have to say i feel quite lucky.

but strange things happen to me or maybe i see the world in a different way. i notice things that seem almost fear a tale -- fairy tale. i came out after i graduated and i was working as a news clerk at "the new york times" which is like the devil wears prada that without the prada with lots of bow ties and the businessmen who would give me bits of advice. i wanted to be a novelist to which i going to return to for my next project, which is going to be fiction. i came out of the building and there was something too good to resist pus push with the dumpstr and not an ordinary because it was filled with about 50 old trunks into these were the old kinds that were brought on the titanic from paris and the

french line. i am not a dumpster diver by trade but i love vintage clothing and a good story so it's eight in the morning and i literally climb on top of that is to and i start -- you are all looking at the very odd. i started going through these dresses in the collections of handbags and among the urban treasure with a red leather diary kept from a woman from 1921 to 1934 at the height of the depression and a long fairy tale short i ended up tracking down the owner is 90 with the help of a private investigator and befriending her. she wanted to be a writer and she hosted a literary salon, she was a renaissance woman who had

love affairs in her story spoke to me so much i ended up telling this story of how this comical made the way back to her and it was sort of given as a gift to the rest of the world. telling the forgotten story was very interesting to me. little things i remember from professors the good stories are often little margins were footnotes. it's not the typical heroic model but it's the other side of the coin and it was that desire and hunger to tell the story that is an untold stor story but there's also this sort of emotional catharsis for the

subject that has been under the radar revealed to the world and i know from speaking to the boys not only does this book take them back in time but they feel very gratified that people care about their story. i don't think many of them call themselves heroes because they were so in support of their husbands and would have seen that as arrogant and inappropriate, but i certainly see them as heroines myself, and i think they have the right stuff. [laughter] [applause]

>> this year marks the 40th anniversary. next on "after words", jay barbree discusses his book about neil armstrong. the first man to walk on the

moon. this is one hour. >> hello, i am a curator here at the space is there and i'm here to talk with jay barbree, who is the author of "neil armstrong: a life of flight." i am very familiar with him because he is if he on tv, i always watch them. so why did you decide to write this up? >> well, neil armstrong and i talked about it for about 20 years. we have been pretty close friends for about half a century and i did a book with anna lindh untrained and alan shepard and d talked about this because he didn't want a biography. he wanted the story of his life.

he felt that anything that he did, any of the other astronauts could do and so he wanted them to get equal credit and he was that type of a guy. he never thought of that as being anything special. we had already wrote one chapter out and i decided to go ahead because people looked at me and i looked around and all of the people were gone. and we have to realize that over half the people were not even here in the 45th anniversary is coming up next week. so anyway they said if you don't do it, who was going to do it. so jim lovell called it a great

look and we did our best to try to get this done for the history and we have had a heavy library sale until he returned to get this going and hopefully we have done a little bit of good. >> there was one earlier biography. >> that is his official biography. you know, he signed that and this is not a biography but a re-creation of his story and i will generally refer to it as ms. and i hate biographies. >> the other one we were talking

about as well. and so in terms of the how you started this book, was a because you had you had a friendship going back for a long time been a did you meet him? i met him in 19 to two when he came in with the second group of this. and he lost a young girl, karen, and she died of a brain tumor at the age of two years old and it was really difficult for neil. i lost a young son myself in one morning we came in to howard johnson on cocoa beach and i was in there talking with someone and he looked at me and he said, who shot your dog and i said well, i told him about it.

and he and i got to talking about it. most people did in no that we have had one let alone lost her. and so that is why they are now named after neil. >> yes. >> so anyway we just got to a certain point where we were such good friends and some people say oh, you are his vest friend. but i don't know who the heck his friend wise. we were the best of friends and we work together and for instance when the challenger blew up i broke it on the story two days later on the tom brokaw show and the first person to call me was him. and he said what did you know that you didn't tell tom brokaw and i said to my tell him everything. but we worked together on that

to get started on this book and then we did, even though we did other stories together and there were others that he thought about and turned it down. but someone had to do it. and hopefully this is part of it. >> tell me about this background. because obviously you were there and nbc. >> when i met him, he was one of the individuals and he was not outgoing and i just knew it. and we talked and it was not

anything special. we talked at howard johnson's where we talked about this and then it grew. >> i would love to give the viewer just a little bit of background. >> i started on nbc news on july 21, 1958 and i have been covering this since april. and so i was a veteran at that time since 1961. i wound up covering this and there's been 166 of them. i was fortunate enough if they look on the inside cover when he made the step on the moon and you can see him across the big television screen stepping off onto the surface of the moon and by then i knew something and he

told me some things in confidence. ..