Space and exploitation land on the obit page

JOSEPH N. BELL

Because I am old and had the good fortune to meet and explore a large

variety of people -- famous and infamous -- over more than a

half-century in journalism, I find names almost weekly in the Los

Angeles Times obituaries that stir very specific memories. That

happens much too frequently these days to recognize them all in this

space. But every so often these memories are irresistible. Like last

week, when two widely disparate men who crossed my life -- briefly

but memorably -- died.

Leroy Gordon Cooper, Jr., was the youngest of the original seven

Mercury Astronauts. And Russ Meyer became infamous -- and very rich

-- for legitimizing soft-core pornography in big budget Hollywood

feature films.

I got acquainted with Cooper when I spent several weeks hanging

out at Langley Field, Va., with the Mercury seven while they were

training for our pioneering ventures into space. Life magazine’s

expensive lock on their personal stories apparently scared off other

media, so I had free and virtually unencumbered access to them on the

base. Being able to talk military flying lingo -- even though my

experiences were pale contrasted with theirs -- didn’t hurt. And from

all this came a book called “Seven Into Space” -- the first published

book on our manned space program.

I remember Cooper from those days as a gangly, all arms and legs,

hell-for-leather Westerner with the deliberate speech of the cowhands

on his father’s Colorado ranch and the casual regard for danger that

would allow him to characterize being one of the first pilots to be

shot into space as “interesting” and -- years later -- to doze while

he awaited blastoff on his first Mercury mission. That’s the image of

Gordon Cooper that was frozen in my head a long time ago. I can’t

picture him at 77, his age when he died at his home in Ventura last

week.

As a 32-year-old Air Force captain and test pilot, Cooper was the

baby of the original seven -- and the only one with no combat

experience. He tended to defer to the older astronauts -- especially

John Glenn -- in group talk, but neither his age nor his relative

lack of experience ever deterred him from saying exactly what he was

thinking when asked a direct question. And sometimes when he wasn’t.

Except for Deke Slayton, who had been grounded by a heart murmur,

Cooper was the last of the original seven to get a ride into space,

which didn’t please him. Two years later, he commanded the Gemini 5

mission, then stuck around NASA for a shot at the moon. That never

happened. When Alan Shepherd -- years his senior -- was chosen over

him to command the Apollo 14 lunar mission and NASA ordered Cooper to

stop driving racing cars, he left the program with a few volleys at

both Shepherd and NASA.

He was called Gordo -- Spanish for “fat,” he told me, which Cooper

decidedly wasn’t. He was intrigued by UFOs and said he “wouldn’t rule

out the possibility that there is human life on other planets.” He

regarded space flight as an extension of his work as a test pilot

“and not much different from conventional aircraft.” And he said:

“I’m gone from home a lot, but we try to live a completely normal

life when I’m there. I don’t think my work has made too much

impression on my family.”

He struck me as that kid in everyone’s high school class who takes

what seem like outrageous chances but aren’t really because he is

very sure of himself and knows exactly what he is doing. Cooper was a

talented aeronautical engineer who understood the odds in his work

and mostly turned them in his favor. Ironically, he was a space

jockey who got his kicks from racing cars and boats.

Russ Meyer -- who died at 82 in his Hollywood Hills home last week

-- took part in a class I taught for three years at UC Irvine called

“The Motion Picture in Contemporary American Society.” It dealt each

week with a different film genre, represented by actors, directors

and writers working in that genre. At one extremity were Disney

family films, and at the other was Russ Meyer. His shtick was

sexploitation, once called by a critic “good, clean fun for adults.”

But by the time he appeared in my class, he had graduated from skin

flicks to major studio films and was being honored at film festivals

and lecturing at Yale.

Most of my visiting guests came down from Hollywood, so I had to

meet people like Charlton Heston, Jack Nicholson and Jack Lemmon at a

filling station just off the freeway and lead them to my classroom.

It was a miracle every time we connected. I remember Russ Meyer

especially because he brought along his then wife and leading lady,

Edy Williams, a statuesque blond, who got out of Meyer’s sports car

in sections to greet me.

Her entrance to the classroom was the high point of the semester,

and I couldn’t get the class underway until I brought her to the

front where she delivered a brief but pithy speech unique in these

halls of academia. Meyer loved all of this. Ego didn’t appear to be a

problem with him. He dealt with the honors that came his way --

mostly for his photography -- in later life with the same irreverence

that characterized his early films. He projected that irreverence to

the students who loved him.

My wife and I took Meyer and Williams to dinner after the class.

We attracted a considerable amount of attention in the restaurant,

but the tone of the talk didn’t change from the classroom. What you

saw in Russ Meyer was what you got, which made him unique in the

world in which he worked.

Meyer’s early movies are almost puritanical contrasted to the

current graphic treatment of sex in films. And they are also almost

as old as I feel when I find Gordon Cooper and Russ Meyer on the obit

page.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.