From Hero To Candidate

By James Kelly

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.

The casting also flatters. In Ed Harris, 32, the producers found an uncanny lookalike, only handsomer. The blond, bristle-topped actor has blue laser eyes, a quick-fire smile, and more charisma than his real-life model.

Nonetheless, all connected with the film rush to claim that no special consideration was given to the character of Glenn. "As Glenn was the first American to orbit the earth, his story is more dramatic than most of the others'," says Irwin Winkler, one of the film's producers. "By condensing Wolfe's book into the drama of a film, Glenn became more sympathetic." Kaufman points out that shooting was wrapped up in October 1982; he contends, somewhat ingenuously, that it was only in December, when Senator Edward Kennedy announced he would not seek the Democratic nomination, that it dawned on him that The Right Stuff might have political resonance. Says Winkler: "The politics caught up with the movie, not the movie with the politics." The film makers say they never received a call from Glenn or his staff seeking a say in the script, nor did any of the movie people consult the Senator.

Will The Right Stuff help Glenn the candidate? Jim Johnson, acting campaign manager for Walter Mondale, Glenn's chief rival, is uncharacteristically catty: "The movie is going to make Glenn look old." That sort of belittling comment is a hint that Mondale aides are at least a little worried about the film's influence. Glenn staffers either dismiss the movie as a factor or play it up gingerly. "It plays no part in our strategy," says Bill White, head of Glenn's campaign. "On balance, though, it's more of a plus." One Democratic Party strategist sees the expected endorsement of Mondale by the AFL-CIO and the premiere of The Right Stuff, both scheduled for next month, as a publicity wash. Says he: "In October, Mondale has the AFL-CIO and Glenn has the movie."

But what if The Right Stuff is a hit, seen by millions of moviegoers in coming months? Clearly it could have a more pronounced effect on the campaign than political pros now think. The film introduces the brave young astronaut to an entire generation that has come of age (and voting age) since the early 1960s and vividly reminds anyone older of what undeniably was a glorious push into the New Frontier. If the on-screen Glenn seems somewhat priggish next to the other fighter jocks, he also seems tailor-made for the presidency. Has anyone ever suffered in a primary for not carousing, or for being too diligent?

Glenn, who has not yet seen the film, dismissed an early draft of the script given to him by NASA as "Laurel and Hardy in space," but now he studiously refrains from speculating on the movie's impact. "It's out of my control," he says with a shrug. Glenn nonetheless appreciates the value of his image, film or no film. He is absenting himself from the gala opening of The Right Stuff in Washington on Oct. 16, evidently recognizing that it would be unseemly to exploit the movie so blatantly. After all, it would just not do for a onetime astronaut, a guy who is decreed by Hollywood to have you-know-what, to display a touch of vainglory. -- By James Kelly. Reported by Sam Allis/ Washington and Denise Worrell/Los Angeles

With reporting by Sam Allis, Denise Worrell This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.