by Buzz Aldrin
H. R. (“Bob”) Haldeman, President Nixon’s White House Chief of Staff, and a key figure in the Nixon Watergate scandal, came in to the dealership one day. Bob had been born and raised in California, so no doubt he was glad to be out of the Washington, D.C., fishbowl for a few days. I could relate to enduring a media frenzy, and we chatted idly for a few minutes about his ordeal. I showed him some cars while we talked about President Nixon and his Watergate troubles, but do you think that I could sell him a Cadillac? No way. I couldn’t sell a car to save my life. In fact, I didn’t sell a single car the entire time I worked at Hillcrest. But at least I drove a nice blue-and-white Cadillac for a while.
LATER THAT SAME month, I ventured out to Edwards Air Force Base to view the first atmospheric “free” flight of the Enterprise, NASA’s new space shuttle test vehicle, as it landed on its own after being hitched to the back of a 747 jumbo jet. The shuttle was originally intended to be named Constitution, but Star Trek fans led a write-in campaign urging that it be christened Enterprise. It was my first time back at Edwards since my ignominious departure five years earlier. It felt a bit odd to be standing in street clothes among the spectators for the test event, but I also felt relieved on a personal level, and hopeful about the new direction in which NASA was headed.
The space shuttle captured the public’s attention with its dazzling display of a different kind of flying spacecraft as it landed on a dry lake-bed runway seven and a half miles long. The winged seventy-five-ton spaceship had already flown piggyback-style, locked to the big jet in a “captive” flight a few weeks earlier. Now, for its first free flight, cars and campers crowded the desert highway that led to the base. Thousands of spectators made the predawn drive over the mountains from Los Angeles to the Mojave plateau to watch the test landing. Already, NASA was planning to send the shuttle on its first flight into space in 1979 from Cape Canaveral, and that mission and the next three to follow were scheduled to end with airplane-like landings at Edwards on the special clay, silt, and sand lake-bed runway.
THE DAY AT Edwards, exhilarating as it was to watch the landing of the shuttle, was also a bitter reminder that I had been trying to exist on my Air Force retirement pay, half of which went to Joan and the kids, and the new job I was trying out at the Cadillac dealership. Added to that, I was still dealing with periodic bouts of depression. My life seemed a perennial struggle, in which I often wondered, Where do I fit in after being an astronaut on the moon? The Technicolor had drained from my life, and I felt discouraged. I couldn’t see how anything could change in the near future. The orderly progressive structure of my early years in which I had achieved so much had stalled. Inevitably, it seemed, I would spiral downward when the people at NASA or the aerospace companies for whom I served as a consultant refused to consider my ideas, ideas that I knew beyond a doubt could help forward our space program. When I was “up,” I charged ahead, believing that change was possible, and that I could make a difference. But when I was “down,” numbness overcame me and after a while I soothed my uneasiness by turning to alcohol.
About that time, Dr. Joseph Pursch reminded me to seek out Clancy Imislund. I had met Clancy while I was still married to Beverly, when I attended one of the meetings recommended by Dr. Don Flinn, but I really didn’t become part of his group until Dr. Pursch recommended him as well. Clancy was known as a more rigid recovery group leader. He could be a little rough around the edges, and he shot straight with the people who came to his meetings, sometimes too straight. “Half of you attending this meeting are going to die drunk,” he said, partially for effect, and partially as a serious warning. Nevertheless, men and women came to his meetings from far and wide, and from every stratum of society; they knew that he loved them enough to tell them the truth.
Once I got to know Clancy, I understood why the psychiatrists held this nonmedical recovery leader in such high regard. Clancy knew what it was like to be an alcoholic. In our conversations, I discovered that he genuinely empathized with what I had experienced; he understood how I felt. As he described his own inability to cope with alcohol, I thought I was listening to my own inner story. Certainly the details of Clancy’s story were different, but his frustration and exasperation at not being able to control his own desires resonated with me. Several decades earlier, he’d drunk so much that he was thrown out of the Los Angeles Midnight Mission, the city’s downtown shelter for homeless people, alcoholics, and drug addicts. He had lost his job, his home, and his family, and he had gotten his two front teeth kicked out in an altercation. He almost died, but he walked seven miles in the rain to Wilshire and Fairfax, where there was an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, and the people there saved his life. Years later, after remaining sober, Clancy left a secure job and took a position running that same Midnight Mission from which he had been ejected years earlier. Since then he had worked with all sorts of people, from multimillionaire business tycoons to Hollywood stars to street people. By the time I met him, he’d been sober for nearly twenty years.
One of the things I liked about Clancy was that he treated me just like anyone else. I was not Buzz Aldrin, astronaut; I was just Buzz, an alcoholic.
Clancy was able to get me to do things that I wouldn’t ordinarily do, especially since they were not intellectually defensible. For example, early on he invited a bunch of other alcoholics and me to come to his home on the outskirts of Venice for a cookout and an afternoon of volleyball in his backyard. Before we could play, however, Clancy passed out some shovels. He stabled a pony in his backyard, so we had to clean up the pony excrement first. The reason was not necessarily to make us nicer or better people, but to gradually change our relationships with the world around us, and our psychological perspectives on our inner worlds. Clancy was also big on humility as an important part of recovery, and few things were more humbling than Hollywood celebrity types—and former astronauts—shoveling pony poop.
I had sworn off drinking several times before meeting Clancy, and had stretched my abstinence to thirty days on at least ten separate occasions. But I’d always found my way back to another bar or another bottle of Scotch. I’d feel almost as though someone had inserted a wind-up spring in my mind while I was sleeping, and that each day the spring was getting tighter and tighter. Before long, I started thinking that a drink might make me feel better. After a while, another drink followed the first, then a second and a third.
With Clancy, I found an “outside” guy who was willing to shoot straight with me. He could see both the problem and me, and he offered advice based on a more objective perspective. When I talked with Clancy about what I was going through, it helped bring clarity to my problem.
Clancy visited me at my workplace at the Hillcrest Cadillac dealership in Beverly Hills. “Leave this job,” he told me straightforwardly. “Get out of here. You’re not doing anything. You’re just sitting in this office all day and people come by to look at the astronaut on display.”
Then one day Clancy came in and told the Browns that I should not be working there. “This is not the sort of job for Buzz Aldrin,” he told the owners. Clancy felt it was demeaning for a man like me, who was an American hero who had walked on the moon, to be making a living selling used and new cars.
I knew he was right, but I had nowhere to go. In Clancy’s opinion, the dealership was simply trading on my celebrity, and I couldn’t blame them for that; I certainly wasn’t selling any cars for them. I had no desire to sell cars, used or new. I walked into my boss’s office and said flatly, “I quit.”
I met with Clancy and his group three or four times each week for months, and little by little, my perception of the world and myself began to change. In the process, Clancy and I became good friends. When an opportunity came up for me to go to Lyon, France, to appear in a parade and convocation with a group of other astronauts and cosmonauts, I had no one else to go with me, so I invited Clancy to accompany me, which he did. Good thing, since the event turned out to be sponsored by a wine company!
Clancy was not merely a friend and an adviser to me, he once even negotiated a contract for me, when the New Orleans Symphony invited me to do a dramatic reading as the orchestra performed Gustav Holst’s The Planets. I gave Clancy a sizable commission for his services, and he relieved me of the burden of having to close a sale.
At Clancy’s meetings, I met various women who were also alcoholics. I struck up relationships with several of them, and their company met a variety of needs in my life, but provided no long-term satisfaction. One woman, however, captured my attention—at least for a season. Her name was Kathy and we met in Clancy’s group.
Kathy met more than a sexual need. She and I became close friends, but she kept slipping back to alcohol. I tried to help her again and again, finding in her a deeper addiction than my own. Kathy and I shared an off-and-on relationship, with no real commitment on either of our parts. But when she struck up a friendship with a carpenter with whom she had become codependent, I became concerned. He was not helping Kathy and I knew it.
How low does a person need to go before looking up? Where does an alcoholic need to be before hitting rock bottom? I don’t know. I’m sure it is different for every one of us, and the lines are often blurred. For me, I arrived at what I can now look back and see as a turning point, although at the time it was just another in a series of drunken disappointments.
Late one night during a relapse, I started drinking again. When I left the bar, I stopped by Kathy’s apartment, but she didn’t answer the door. I started pounding on the door in the middle of the night, completely oblivious to the possibility that she might not be home. When nobody answered the door, I broke it down. Before long, two police cruisers pulled up outside the apartment. Kathy’s neighbors had called them. The officers subdued me, cuffed me, and led me to their car, “helping” me in a not-so-gentle fashion into the backseat of the police cruiser.
They took me downtown to the police station, and prepared to book me for disorderly conduct. As I looked around the police station, I attempted to do what I always did—play on my celebrity. The officers recognized me, and I could tell that they really didn’t want to book me, but they couldn’t let me back on the streets in my inebriated condition. “Do you have any friends you can call?” an officer suggested. “Someone who would be willing to take responsibility for you and get you home?”
I called Clancy to come and pick me up, but he refused. “If you want to drink, you are an adult. Go ahead and drink,” he said, “but don’t bother me.” He wasn’t angry at me for waking him in the middle of the night, or for stepping off the path he was helping me to follow. Clancy knew alcoholics, and he knew that most of us had a rather sporadic record when it came to establishing a new direction in life. I could hear the disappointment in his voice, but in my semi-inebriated state, I didn’t really care.
I hung up the phone and called another good friend I had come to know in AA, Dick Boolootian, asking him to come down to the jail and pick me up. Dick was a brilliant educator, a doctor of science, and a good man. When he walked in and saw me in jail, I thought he might weep. He didn’t rebuke me, scold me, or say anything all that profound, but the look in his eyes seared into my soul. He signed me out of the police station and took me home. Dick stayed for a while and tried to talk to me, but I was not conversant. “Go to bed, Buzz,” Dick said as he looked at me before going out the door. “Please.”
“I will, Dick. I will. I’m just going to sit up for a few more minutes and watch the news. I’ll call you later on.” Dick nodded and went out the door. After Dick went home, I couldn’t sleep, so I started looking around for a bottle. Before long, I found one and downed it. I had hit bottom. Clancy and I stopped meeting regularly after that, and I began meeting with another Alcoholics Anonymous group in West LA.
I found that the shame of starting over again once I had been sober for a long stretch was a blow to my ego, a process that I did not care to repeat. It takes genuine humility to turn your life over to a higher power, and that may be why it is so difficult for some people to stop their destructive behaviors. Moreover, you can’t compromise. You can’t say, “Well, I’ve quit drinking hard liquor, but I’ll still have a few beers with the boys.” Half-measures are doomed to fail. I’ve heard of people who quit drinking liquor but literally drank Aqua Velva shaving lotion. Another lady chugged her perfume, all the while claiming that she hadn’t had a drink of alcohol.
Many people say, “I just can’t help it; I have to drink. I can’t get well.” I said that, too. The truth is, getting well is a choice. Yes, you can get well; it may take somebody bigger than you to help you, but people in far worse circumstances than yours have gotten well. You can, too.
It is not easy, especially when alcohol and depression are riding tandem on a person. According to the addiction expert Dr. Joe Takamine, the leading cause of suicide is depression; the second leading cause is alcohol. When those two cohorts gang up on the same person, the end result is often not pretty
During this time, I also met regularly with Dr. Pursch on an outpatient basis. By now Pursch’s reputation had grown even larger. Among his patients was Billy Carter, the brother of President Jimmy Carter, whom he had treated for alcoholism. Pursch affirmed that if I could stay sober, the rest of my life would come together. The doctor was right.
Finally, in October 1978, I laid down alcohol once and for all. My willingness to do so was not an act of willpower so much as a coming to the end of my own selfishness. I had always been self-centered, and because of my abilities or my intelligence or my fame, people had let me get away with it. When I began to see myself for what I really was, and had a group of fellow travelers who knew me for what I was—and were not impressed—I began to take baby steps toward getting well. Along the way, I learned that to truly keep something and hold onto it, you have to give it away.
After I had been sober for about a year, Dr. Pursch asked me if I would visit with Betty Ford, the wife of President Gerald Ford. Mrs. Ford was going through the same Navy recovery program that I had gone through with Dr. Pursch, and I was glad to offer her some encouragement. After completing her program at the U.S. Naval Hospital in Long Beach, Mrs. Ford talked to her friends about the need for a treatment center that emphasized the special needs of women. Her good friend Leonard Firestone encouraged Mrs. Ford to pursue her dream, and in 1982 they cofounded the nonprofit Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, California, where untold numbers of people have found help in overcoming alcoholism and chemical dependencies.
Dr. Pursch later asked me to visit with William Holden, which I was glad to do, but Bill didn’t respond well. The Oscar-winning actor who had appeared in such films as The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Towering Inferno, and Network was more concerned about getting back to the set of a movie he was making than he was about taking seriously his own recovery program. Stefanie Powers, his companion at the time, tried to help him, and she meant well, but even she couldn’t find a way to keep Bill from walking out on the opportunity to get help. Bill eventually left the program and went back to drinking. Sadly, on November 16, 1981, Bill fell down drunk in his own home, lacerating his head and bleeding to death. When his body was discovered more than four days later, doctors estimated that he had been conscious for more than thirty minutes after the fall, but didn’t recognize the seriousness of his injury due to the level of alcohol in his system. When I heard about Bill’s death, it saddened me deeply. I knew that could have easily been me had it not been for the turnaround I had experienced in my life.
And I was indeed a very, very grateful man.
11
REAWAKENING
AS THE TENTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE APOLLO 11 MOON LANDing approached, I was experiencing a reawakening in my own life. Following my personal epiphany in October 1978, the milestone from which I dated my sobriety, I was ready to plunge back into helping America’s space program be more farsighted and productive. I also felt compelled to help others fight their battles with depression and alcoholism. Perhaps
they could learn from what I had experienced.
I had once been known as the “best scientific mind in space” according to Life magazine. I even carried a slide rule on the Gemini 12 flight in case I needed to correct the computer on the rendezvous maneuvers. That’s because I knew if the computer said we were twenty feet out of plane, I could count on ten of that, but not all twenty I could pretty much figure out rendezvous maneuvers in my head.
But the ten years since my moonwalk were not filled with achievements, bold accomplishments, and grand acclamations. It had been my decade of personal hell. By 1979, I felt that all that was changing for me. I still suffered occasional setbacks from depression, but overall my life was on an upswing. What helped me most was following the recommendations in the Alcoholics Anonymous “Big Book”—the book in which the twelve-step recovery program was originally outlined—to get my eyes off myself and start helping somebody else. I hoped to do that by attending classes and seminars in which I could study to become a consultant on alcoholism. I was forty-nine years old when I started a one-week course in June 1979, at the University of Utah’s School on Alcoholism and Other Drug Dependencies. I went from there to Rutgers University in New Jersey for a three-week-long-summer-school course at the Center for Alcohol Studies. Both of these courses provided tremendous keys for understanding my own alcoholism and recognizing alcoholic tendencies in others.
As part of our class work at Rutgers, I was assigned to do a project report on some facet of alcoholism. I chose the delicate subject of alcohol’s effects on pilots, specifically commercial airline pilots; and the employee programs designed to combat alcoholism at Eastern Airlines. Flying and alcohol seemed to go together for many pilots. I knew that to be true. When I was flying combat missions in Korea and later practicing to deliver nuclear bombs from our bases in Germany and other parts of the world, my first stop after landing was the officers’ club. Of course, a smart pilot doesn’t dare be impaired when flying, but once out of the cockpit and away from the stress, it is time to relax and let your hair down. Even as an astronaut, I drank regularly and heavily right up to a few days before lifting off for the moon. So I was acutely aware of how pilots tended to relax with the help of alcohol, and I also knew how addictive misusing alcohol could become.