Marilyn Lovell, whose husband commanded the troubled Apollo 13 spacecraft and whose outward stoicism and inner pain embodied the emotional toll of the space program on astronauts’ wives, died Aug. 27 in Lake Forest, Illinois. She was 93 years old.
The death was confirmed by Wenban Funeral Home in Lake Forest. No cause was reported.
Mrs. Lovell knew the rigors of military life, having accompanied her husband, Capt. James A. Lovell Jr., on his tours of duty as a Navy pilot and flight instructor before he joined NASA’s astronaut corps in 1962 and was almost single-mindedly committed to training for a trip to the Alles.
As Captain Lovell flew on multiple Gemini missions with increasing responsibility, it fell to Mrs. Lovell to raise and educate her four children largely alone and endure the sexist news coverage of the day. (“Marilyn Lovell is sweet, active and efficient,” says one profile. “She has the first two qualities naturally.”)
Like other astronauts’ wives, Mrs. Lovell placed her husband’s dream of going to the moon above all else. She hid her pregnancy from him for four months, fearing that it would put him behind.
“The women have it the hardest,” she told the Associated Press in 1968. “The boys can join in.”
Captain Lovell let his wife know he was thinking of her in space. One Christmas, when he was thousands of miles away, he sent her a mink coat. The card bore the inscription “To Marilyn – from the Man in the Moon.” Another time he called a moon mountain Mount Marilyn.
A few months before the Apollo 13 flight, Captain Lovell took them to see Marooned, a fictional film about three Apollo astronauts who are unable to return from space due to a catastrophic rocket failure. One of the crew members is named Jim, like her husband. He is sucked into space.
Ms Lovell identified other causes for the impending doom. First, there was the unlucky number 13. “It bothered me,” she told NBC News in a special broadcast marking the mission’s 40th anniversary. “And I said, ‘Well, what happened at 14?'”
Then, the day before the explosion, Mrs. Lovell was in the shower when her wedding ring slipped and fell into the drain. “I was just scared because it was like an omen to me that something was really going to happen,” she said.
She kept the news of the lost ring to herself.
“For some reason, the astronaut wives never discussed anything that would worry their husbands before they went on a flight,” she told NBC News. “I mean, we kept everything to ourselves.”
Apollo 13, which launched on April 11, 1970, was nowhere near as recent as previous space missions. Television networks did not provide widespread coverage, and none of them carried what was supposed to be a special live broadcast of the astronauts from space. (The Beatles’ breakup was the big news of the week.)
But on the third day of the mission—April 13, that unfortunate number again—Mrs. Lovell’s phone rang. It was a friend at NASA. He sounded shocked.
“Marilyn,” the friend said, “I just want you to know that all these different countries have offered to help, you know, with recovery and whatever.”
She had no idea what he was talking about.
“Have you been drinking?” She said.
NASA officials soon arrived and informed her that there had been an explosion on board. For the next four days, as the world watched NASA try to save the astronauts, Ms. Lovell put on a brave face for television reporters stationed outside her home.
“Would you like a ham sandwich?” she asked a reporter on her lawn.
But it was just an act. She prayed on the bathroom floor, out of sight of friends, family and the Lovells’ children. She thought about how she would raise her children alone.
On April 17, her husband and the other astronauts splashed around in the Pacific Ocean. Everyone survived.
“For four days,” she said later, “I didn’t know whether I was going to be a wife or a widow.”
Director Ron Howard turned the episode into the hit film Apollo 13 (1995), helping to immortalize the phrase “Houston, we have a problem,” even if that wasn’t exactly what the astronauts said after the explosion . (Captain Lovell said, “Uh, Houston, we had a problem.”)
Tom Hanks played Captain Lovell. Kathleen Quinlan played Mrs. Lovell and was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.
Marilyn Lillie Gerlach, the youngest of five siblings, was born on July 11, 1930 in Milwaukee. Her father owned a candy store and she would sometimes slip into the window to eat chocolate bunnies.
As a 13-year-old freshman at Juneau High School in Milwaukee, she exchanged shy glances with Lovell, who was two years older and worked behind the cafeteria counter to earn a free lunch.
“Prom was coming up and I had to ask a girl to the prom, you had to invite young girls,” Captain Lovell later told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. “I invited a girl, but when she found out I wasn’t going to be prom king, she dropped me like a hot potato. I didn’t have anyone else, so I invited Marilyn.”
They continued to be together throughout high school. She attended Wisconsin State Teachers College in Milwaukee while he was at the University of Wisconsin, and later transferred to George Washington University in Washington to be near Captain Lovell while he attended the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis .
They married in 1952 after he graduated. In addition to her husband, survivors include four children: Barbara Harrison, James Lovell III, Susan Lovell and Jeffrey Lovell; 11 grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren.
Ms. Lovell was an active member of the Astronaut Wives Club, an informal group that provided advice and support to other astronaut wives. But after the Apollo 13 incident, she didn’t allow him to travel into space again. Captain Lovell worked in the telecommunications industry and ran a restaurant near Chicago.
Their marriage was one of the few astronaut unions to survive the stress of space travel. That April 1970, Mrs. Lovell never gave up hope.
“I just knew he would come back,” she said.