Magnificent Desolation

by Buzz Aldrin

  13 Sylvia Earle Interview, Academy of Achievement website: http://www.achievment.org/autodoc/page/ear0int-1.

  12

  FINDING the LOVE

  of MY LIFE

  I SENSED THE BEAUTIFUL WOMAN EVEN BEFORE I SAW HER. I always had an eye for great-looking women, and since being divorced from Beverly nine years earlier, I had established a bit of a reputation as a “player” in the Los Angeles area. At my age, I was more familiar with the term playboy, and although I didn’t necessarily see myself that way, I can now understand how those who knew me then may have used such terms to describe me. From my perspective, I simply enjoyed the company of a beautiful woman. I did not enjoy being lonely, so I dated frequently, although never with an inclination toward marriage.

  But when I saw the woman conversing with the hostess of the party, Joan Williams, I stopped in my tracks. Bright blue eyes, platinum blonde, vivacious personality with a vibrant smile, she seemed to exude positive energy. She was wearing high heels and a black-and-white-polka-dot designer cocktail dress that highlighted her petite, shapely figure.

  Mmm, this could be interesting! I thought.

  I was right.

  I HAD BEEN invited to the party at the Bel Air Bay Club on Friday evening, October 4, 1985, by a “recovering” friend of mine, Molly Barnes. I was always glad for an opportunity to get out and meet some new people, and it was a casual event at the beach, so I put on a pair of jeans and a light blue shirt with a large embroidered eagle insignia and headed to the club. Somehow, once at the party, Molly and I went our separate ways, and as I circulated among the guests, Joan Williams saw me and grabbed my arm. “Buzz, there’s somebody I’d like you to meet,” she said as she steered me along.

  “Lois, I want you to meet an astronaut who went to the moon. This is Buzz Aldrin. Buzz, this is Lois Driggs Cannon.”

  Lois later confessed that she was totally unimpressed. Astronauts were not on her list. Bankers, lawyers, tycoons? Oh yes. But astronauts? Hardly.

  Lois and I talked for a while, and I was struck by her vitality When it came time to leave, I impulsively asked her for a date the following night.

  “Oh no,” Lois said. “You’re not going to want to drive sixty miles to Laguna Beach. Besides, I’m going to a black-tie party tomorrow evening.” Lois leaned back a bit, eyeing me as if to say, And you probably don’t even own a tuxedo.

  She was right. But I did have some good-looking military uniforms.

  “Maybe another time,” Lois said.

  I looked at this woman and felt strongly that I didn’t want to let her go. “I will take you to that party,” I said firmly. “What time do you want me to pick you up? I assure you that I will be properly dressed.”

  Lois seemed surprised, but not put off by my straightforwardness. “What you don’t know,” I continued, “is that tonight is my last night in Los Angeles, and I’m moving to Laguna Beach tomorrow.” It sounded like a good pickup line, but it was true. “I bought a place there about a month ago,” I explained, “and I’m taking my final load of belongings to my new home tomorrow. So I will be in Laguna Beach, and I will take you to the party.” I wrangled Lois’s telephone number and promised to check in with her the next day.

  Lois went back to her daughter Lisa’s home in Beverly Hills that night and admitted that she had not handled our meeting well. “How could I have allowed him to talk me into going to the party tomorrow night?” she groused. “I wanted to go by myself because I’m sure there will be a number of outstanding gentlemen in attendance.”

  Lisa laughed and tried to console her mother.

  “Maybe he won’t really call,” Lois suggested.

  I did.

  The following evening, I wore my Air Force dress white coat, replete with an assortment of medals that I had been awarded, decked out over my left breast pocket area. I rang the doorbell at Lois’s home in Emerald Bay, the exclusive, private gated beach community at the north end of Laguna. When she opened the door, I was nearly flabbergasted at her appearance. She looked positively radiant, wearing a Chanel sweater and a long black Chanel skirt. Lois greeted me warmly, and I noticed her eyes roaming up and down my body; she seemed pleasantly surprised that I “dressed up so well.”

  The event we attended was the opening of the members-only Center Club for the Orange County Performing Arts Center, a rather sophisticated, erudite bunch. As we made what we thought was going to be an inconspicuous entrance, photographers’ flashes started going off in our direction. Lois’s friends seemed impressed by the moonwalker astronaut tagging along in his dress whites. After making the rounds, Lois greeting her friends and perfunctorily introducing me, she and I danced the night away. Although she tried to remain a bit coy, every so often as we swirled gracefully around the dance floor, out of the corner of my eye, I thought I detected a glint in her eye. When I took Lois home, I politely kissed her goodnight. I wanted to see her again, and it seemed that perhaps astronauts had finally made her list, albeit at the bottom. Both of us, however, had already committed to dates with other people the following night, so we practically stumbled over ourselves in trying to apologize for not being available.

  “I have an idea,” Lois suggested. “I’m attending a charity event, the Concourse to Elegance, tomorrow afternoon. You could come along with me to that.”

  “Good,” I said. “But before we do, why don’t you come over to have lunch with me. My uncle, Bob Moon, is visiting, and I’d like you two to meet.”

  On Sunday afternoon, Lois and I enjoyed lunch with my uncle and then toured the Concourse to Elegance at the University of California Irvine campus near Laguna. As we walked along, we conversed about my future plans. “What do you want to do in life?” she asked straightforwardly.

  I answered her equally directly, without a moment’s hesitation. “I want to serve my country.”

  At one point, as we were riding in my car, Lois asked me gingerly, “Tell me about yourself.” I was uncomfortable in talking about myself, so I simply reached into the backseat of the car and pulled out a copy of Return to Earth, the first book I had written following my trip to the moon. “Here, read this,” I said. “It will tell you everything you might want to know about me.” Lois laughed, but she took the book. By afternoon’s end, we were looking for another opportunity to get together.

  “How about Monday night?” I suggested.

  “Well, I’m supposed to fly to Phoenix to spend a few days with my family, but I could go on Tuesday.”

  “Great! I have a recovery meeting on Monday evening, and I’d like you to go with me.” Looking back, I have to smile at the fact that one of the first places I took Lois was to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Over the course of the weekend, I had explained to Lois that I didn’t drink, that I had not in fact taken a drink since October 1978. She seemed impressed, but since she was raised in the Mormon religion, in which alcohol was frowned upon, she could not readily relate to how difficult and significant an accomplishment my cessation of drinking really was. Nevertheless, she was interested in meeting my friends.

  Once there, I spoke briefly about myself and my battle with alcohol. Lois was impressed with the “spiritual” tenor of the meeting, and that I would be attracted to such a group and, more important, committed to not drinking alcohol again. Afterwards, I took Lois home and we sat on the couch and talked for quite a while. Before I left, we kissed— really kissed. Something magical happened.

  Lois went on to Phoenix to visit her family, and I busied myself preparing for a Sea Space Symposium scuba-diving trip in Egypt. Somewhere in my preparations, it struck me: Why not invite Lois to go along?

  I called her in Phoenix, where, I later learned, I had been quite a topic of conversation. “Lois, I’m going to Egypt October 31 through November 11, along with some friends and their wives. Would you like to come along?”

  We talked briefly, and I told her about my association with the Sea Space Symposium, and I gave her the flight information. When she asked me about
hotel accommodations, I said, “Oh, don’t worry, I’ll take care of that.” Lois apparently trusted me enough to book two rooms at the hotel in Egypt.

  Our flight to Cairo included a long layover in Paris, so, rather than remain at the airport, Lois and I took a taxi into the City of Light and did a whirlwind walking tour of the most popular sites, and then we stopped for lunch at Le Fouquet’s, a well-known Parisian restaurant. It was November 2, Lois’s birthday, and for a few hours we felt drawn into the city’s romantic charm as if we were in our own little world.

  When we arrived in Hurghada, Egypt, one of the most popular diving resorts along the Red Sea, the men on the trip hustled off to a diving location, while the women planned an excursion to Luxor, the location of King Tut’s tomb and other interesting sites, about four hours away. Lois hurried to pack an overnight bag, but by the time she got downstairs, the bus had already left. Ever resourceful, she persuaded an Arab taxi driver to take her to Luxor. Before leaving, Lois left me a note: “All the girls left, but I ran off on a camel with a sheik to catch up with them. See you tomorrow.”

  On the way to Luxor, the driver spoke no English and Lois didn’t speak Arabic. About every twenty or thirty miles the driver was stopped by heavily armed guards at checkpoints. I would love to have heard his explanation for carting a cute blonde on a four-hour trek across the desert.

  When Lois was finally reunited with the other women, they received her with open arms. She had made quite an impression with her pluck and verve.

  Lois roomed with me when she returned, since I had booked only one room, tempting Lois to abandon her strict religious upbringing to spend the few days with me. Eventually, she joyfully succumbed to my thinly veiled seduction. After that, Lois accompanied me wherever I went, including a long bus excursion to Cairo, where we met and had dinner with President Mubarak. By the time we arrived back in Los Angeles on Monday, November 11, Lois had won my friends’ hearts as well as mine.

  NOT LONG AFTER our adventure in Egypt, I took Lois with me to a conference in Houston, where she met a number of former astronauts. All my astronaut peers found her quite charming and put on their best behavior for her. We also had lunch with Merv Hughs, a friend of mine from my astronaut days in Houston. After assessing the situation, Merv whispered to Lois, “Don’t get your hopes up. Buzz loves women, and women love Buzz. And he’s not about to settle down.”

  Undaunted, Lois insisted on believing that she and I were a couple with a future. She invited me to go with her to Sun Valley for Christmas, and I accepted. I was not much of a skier, but I figured I could learn. Lois gave me a few pointers, and we were off. Of course, making your way up and down the slopes in Sun Valley is only part of the fun. Skiing there is as much a social event as recreation or physical exercise. Lois seemed to know everybody on the slopes, and they knew her. She introduced me to someone new everywhere we went.

  At Lois’s condominium, she introduced me to her children, all of whom were in their mid-to late twenties—her son, Bryant, her younger daughter, Brynn, and her older daughter, Lisa, with whom she had been staying the night we first met at the Bel Air Bay Club. Lois had spoken about me in such glowing terms, Lisa was no doubt expecting some suave, smooth-talking bachelor. Imagine Lisa’s surprise when I presented a somewhat stiff and reserved demeanor, sitting on the sofa in front of the fireplace and barely engaging in any conversation. Although I was doing much better these days, the effects of depression and alcoholism from years past had taken a toll on my exuberance. Lois sat beside me, emoting over her children and emanating enough warmth and enthusiasm to fill the entire living room. Meanwhile, I barely cracked a smile as I leaned forward and pored over some scientific space papers on the coffee table. No doubt, the kids thought, Oh my! What has Mom gotten herself into with this guy? Nevertheless, I enjoyed meeting the people closest to Lois, and her children accepted me immediately and made me feel welcome.

  A few weeks later, in mid-January I invited Lois to accompany me to another event, in Hawaii and Lois readily accepted. The day before we departed, however, Lois called my house, and a former girlfriend of mine answered the phone.

  “Who are you?” Lois asked.

  “I’m a friend of Buzz’s. Who are you?” she asked belligerently.

  “Please have Buzz call me,” Lois replied, and hung up the phone. When I called, of course, it took some explaining to convince Lois that the woman who answered the telephone was a friend from my recovery group, a feature from my past, rather than a present girlfriend. Lois reluctantly accepted my apology, and agreed to go along to Hawaii for a space conference in Honolulu. Following the conference, we spent a couple of days at a good friend of mine’s hotel in Kona on the Big Island. It was the week of my fifty-sixth birthday, and Lois wanted to celebrate, but after a day or two in Kona, for no explainable reason, I felt that I was falling into a blue funk. I didn’t want to leave our hotel room; in fact, I didn’t even want to get out of bed. In Honolulu, I had presented my Mars cycler concept to President Reagan’s advisory panel on the U.S. space program. The members listened attentively, but I came away disappointed, wondering if my words had fallen on deaf ears. That partially explained my emotional turmoil. But perhaps I was also suffering from a guilty conscience, since I had planned to go see a former girlfriend in Florida following this trip to Hawaii.

  Lois was baffled. Here we were, in a gorgeous, picturesque, romantic setting in Kona, and I didn’t want to go outside. So I didn’t. I stayed in bed and watched the news.

  One afternoon, Lois returned from the beach and overheard me talking on the telephone: “Okay, Scott, my dear. I just wanted you to know that I’m not coming to Florida.”

  Lois’s interest was immediately piqued. “Oh, are you going to Florida?” she asked. “Who were you talking to?”

  “Yes, I was scheduled to go to Florida.”

  “Oh, why were you going?”

  “I have a friend there whom I was going to see.”

  “Male or female?”

  “Scott, an old girlfriend,” I answered honestly.

  “You were planning to go there, while I’m here with you in Hawaii?” I could see the hurt and disappointment in Lois’s face.

  “I’m not sure I can handle this,” she said quietly. “I think I’ll go back to Sun Valley to ski.” The remainder of our time in Hawaii was rather cool, and I don’t mean the air temperature. Lois was clearly upset, and I couldn’t get outside of myself far enough to understand why she was angry. We returned to California, and Lois set off to Idaho. “I’ll be back at the end of March,” she said, “but don’t bother to call.”

  I had thought that Lois was the love of my life; instead, it seemed that our whirlwind relationship had come to a sudden and ignominious end.

  13

  The LOIS

  FACTOR

  A LONE AGAIN AT MY CALIFORNIA HOME, I TRIED TO GET back into the normal swing of life—life without Lois. I was not expecting the emptiness, or that gnawing in the pit of my stomach, and I was surprised at the pervasive sense of loneliness I felt without her. I couldn’t understand it. I had broken up with women before, and simply gone on to the next interesting person I met. I mentally reviewed all the usual lines: “There are plenty of fish in the sea.” “Too bad; her loss.” “Don’t let the door hit you as you leave.” I knew I could go to another party somewhere in Beverly Hills, flash my medals or tell a few stories about the moon, and leave the party with a beautiful woman on my arm. But I didn’t want to do that. More and more as the days passed between January and March, I wanted Lois. Strange as it may sound, I liked me better because of her; I liked the person I was when I was with her. She motivated me, and she jolted me out of my scientific studies and space dreams long enough to enjoy social gatherings filled with new and interesting people.

  I smiled as I thought of her. How had that petite bundle of positive energy so boldly entered the inner recesses of my psyche and stolen away with my heart? And how had I been so foolish as to let her
get away? I liked Lois; I didn’t want to lose her; Lois was unlike any other woman I had known. Lois was different. Lois was … special.

  LOIS’S MOTHER, Effie Olena Killian, was a beautiful woman of Norwegian descent, whose family lived in Thatcher, Arizona. Her father, Douglas H. Driggs, hailed from Driggs, Idaho; his family had founded the town, set in the picturesque valley west of the Grand Tetons, that today hosts the popular ski resort Grand Targhee. In 1921 the family traded all of their holdings, including a bank, hotel, and wheat farm for over 300 acres of farmland planted with cotton near Phoenix, Arizona. As cotton prices plummeted, they lost their entire investment and had to start over. But that did not dissuade either of Lois’s parents, who were from hardworking, prominent pioneer Mormon families, and who followed their faith with every footstep.

  Lois Adele Driggs was born November 2, 1929—just a couple of months before me—in Miami, Arizona, a small mining town. Along with two brothers and one sister, she grew up in the Phoenix area, where her father, an enterprising businessman, opened a bank during the Depression years. Douglas Driggs traveled the surrounding ranching and mining communities, using his trust-evoking and spirited enthusiasm to influence new customers to pay twenty-five dollars to open a savings account. His reputation for honesty met with success, and the bank became known as the Western Savings and Loan Association— eventually becoming the eleventh-largest state-chartered savings-and-loan company in America, with over $5 billion in assets. As the business prospered, the family rose in the social echelons of the Phoenix/Scottsdale area.

  Lois’s childhood was like a Norman Rockwell painting; everything was perfect. She studied tap, toe, and acrobatic dancing, as well as the popular boogie-woogie and swing styles on the piano. She was an active drama student who participated in several plays in high school and college, and she readily made friends wherever she went.