Cinema: From Hero To Candidate

Glenn gets a rousing political send-off on the big screen

Halfway into the film, one still is not quite sure what to make of this guy Glenn. He has the right stuff, but he also possesses a moralizing streak as wide as the runway at Edwards Air Force Base. At a press conference introducing all seven Mercury astronauts, Glenn comes across as a showboater spouting platitudes about God and Country and Family and the Wright Brothers.

But then flash ahead a few scenes. It is the day of a launch, and Glenn is on the phone with his wife, a painful stutterer. Vice President Lyndon Johnson is fuming in his limousine outside the Glenn house, a NASA official is badgering Glenn, but the astronaut stands firm. "Annie, listen to me. I will back you all the way, one hundred percent," says Glenn. "I don't want Johnson or any of the rest of them to put so much as one toe inside our house." Cut to a weepy but relieved Annie Glenn, then cut back to the other astronauts rallying around their comrade and strutting like schoolyard princes.

All at once, the ambiguity about Glenn is gone. He is seen as a loving husband and a natural leader, unhesitant to put principles above career. Here he is humming The Battle Hymn of the Republic during reentry, there he is waving to the thousands crammed along the route of a ticker-tape parade. The heroic depiction of Glenn would be unremarkable except for one thing: the real life John Glenn, now 62 and the senior Senator from Ohio, is running for the Democratic presidential nomination. Never before has a major candidate been featured (and favorably, at that) in a big-budget Hollywood film released just as the election season warms up. Three weeks before the picture premieres, the impact of such a rousing send-off is already being debated from the corridors of Washington to the commissaries of Hollywood.

Glenn unquestionably fares better on celluloid than in Tom Wolfe's book, published to high acclaim in 1979. As caught in the whambang whirl of Wolfe's prose, the young astronaut seemed more of a Presbyterian prude, a sort of born-again Sky King. While Wolfe poked fun at Glenn the boy policing the language of his school chums, the film focuses only on Glenn the adult. Other digs are neatly skipped over. Wolfe, for example, implies that Glenn sought out NASA officials to discuss replacing Alan Shephard on the first flight, but not a hint of that appears on the screen.

Glenn benefits by additions as well as excisions. One tender scene was inspired by a 1959 picture in LIFE magazine of Glenn and his wife sprawled on a day bed. In the movie, Glenn confesses to Annie that his fellow pilots consider him "a gung-ho type." When Annie breaks into giggles, Glenn turns to her with affection. "Oh, you agree? My own wife? Do you think I'm a Dudley Do-Right?" The pair chuckle softly, but not before Glenn strikes a mock heroic pose and delivers a few self-deprecating lines. Director Philip Kaufman, who also wrote the screenplay, admits that he has no idea if the Senator is capable of laughing at himself, but old newsreel footage of a beaming Glenn convinced him that the astronaut at least must have been "good-natured." According to Kaufman, the doting scene also prepares the viewer for the later exchange between the Glenns about barring Johnson from the house.