by Andrew Smith
Four actors stand onstage, holding microphones. Two I don’t recognize, but Walter Koenig is instantly familiar as Chekov from the original series, and the drunk bad-guy lech from next door is unforgettable. He looks a little like Bruce Willis and has a beer in his hand.
A question from the floor:
“Who’s the most famous person you’ve ever met?”
“Marlon Brando,” someone says to great enthusiasm.
“Cary Grant,” offers Chekov.
More clapping. Almost Bruce tells a story about meeting Charlton Heston, “fucking Moses,” at a urinal, which ends “then he left and I could piss again,” and Chekov suddenly pipes: “Betty Grable!” to thunderous applause. A very large man with a beard asks a question about favourite drinks, which Almost Bruce is still kicking around when the MC announces that Denise Crosby is now due onstage and a ripple of anticipation passes through the hall as she arrives, smiling a little tensely, I think. She talks about her career for some time, focussing on her understanding of Lt. Yar, but when she’s finished, nobody can think of any questions to ask.
“Aw c’mon, you gotta have some questions,” the actress scolds.
Okay. The bearded man raises his hand.
“Uh. You’re not in the new movie, are you?”
A long speech ensues, which is hard to follow beyond the fact that she thinks she should be.
“…’Cos it has Romulans in it, like, you know – duh! So I called the producer, Hal, and I said, ‘Hal, you should pop me in the movie …’”
Another question, “Why did you leave Star Trek?” is like one of those tiny Japanese pellets that you drop in a bath and watch grow into great paper jungles.
“I’ve never regretted leaving Star Trek. I was at an impasse. And I was beginning to feel like a glorified extra. And had I stayed, I wouldn’t have done Pet Sematary. I wouldn’t have done Key West, or … a number of other things! Then, I came back for Yesterday’s Enterprise.”
From the floor: “That was a beautiful performance!”
Applause. She beams.
“Thank you so much.”
Someone else from the floor: “Will you ever do Playboy again?”
A tense pause.
“Wow, that is off the subject of Star Trek. That was in 1980.”
“I know – I have the issue!”
I go back to the autograph chamber and the Dick Gordon table is still empty. Then, just as despair is about to take hold, a small, elderly man in thick, black-rimmed spectacles crosses the threshold and heads in the right direction. I realize again that the man I’ve been looking for is an athletic thirty-nine-year-old beaming from an Apollo romper suit. He walks upright and slowly, so as not to upset the mustard-smothered hot dog and fries he balances on a paper plate with his left hand, nor to spill coffee from the Styrofoam cup in his right. Blue slacks and a green check shirt strain to tame a lordly paunch. Reaching the table, he puts the coffee down and, suspending the hot dog plate in the air above it, rotates on its axis until he is behind the table, where he sits down. He glances up and grins broadly at someone who walks past. When he smiles, he reminds me enormously of Roy Orbison.
I watch for a while. Dick Gordon eats. No one notices. The room has filled up and queues have formed in front of some of the other tables. One of them is getting long and there’s enough of a jam that I can’t even see who it’s for. A roomful of people who are famous to one degree or another for pretending to be death-mocking space adventurers and here, tucked away in a corner, is a real one, and no one knows who he is. Or wants to know. The fakes look more convincing.
I buy two Gordon photos from a table in the middle of the room and take them over, introduce myself. He invites me to sit down and help collect the “widgets” which are used as currency here. He’s relaxed and affable, with a pilot’s eye for the deflecting wisecrack. He talks about space the way your neighbour might discuss aphids over the garden fence. Flight controller Chris Kraft once observed that, while Deke Slayton put together crews that he hoped would complement each other, “it was a real feat because he was dealing with a group that included world-class prima donnas.” It seems unlikely that he had Dick Gordon in mind when he said it.
Almost immediately, a young man approaches with a nervy smile. He’s dressed in black and wearing a cape.
“Did you actually walk on the Moon?” he blurts.
No, Gordon tells him, he stayed in the spacecraft while the others went. He starts to expand, but the boy cuts him off with an “Oh.” He lifts his eyes to the wall, smiles wanly, and moves on, much as I had with Major Don West from Lost in Space. The astronaut betrays no emotion.
We talk about the origin of Apollo and he takes a comfortably apolitical line on it: “Kennedy had the foresight to challenge the American people to go to the Moon … we hadn’t even been in orbit at that stage … we were all saying ‘what?’ ” He talks about the technological benefits of the programme: miniaturization, communications advances, better weather forecasts, increased interest in science, and as always when enthusiasts speak this way, the figure of 24,000,000,000 1960s dollars looms like a planet in my imagination, because the claim that any meaningful technological advances would have failed to happen but for a $24 billion space programme is incredible to me. I just don’t buy it. If Apollo can be justified – and I’m keeping an open mind on this at present – it’s for other reasons.
I tell him about my encounter with Charlie and Dotty Duke on the day of Pete Conrad’s death and he nods his head firmly.
“Yup. The eighth of July of 1998.”
Afterwards, I remember that it was actually 1999. I wonder if he’s thought about the fact that there are only nine Moonwalkers left and one day there won’t be any? His eyes go misty and he talks slowly, as if tackling a complex equation.
“Yeah … I guess it won’t be very long … because twenty-four guys ventured out there … twelve walked on the Moon … then Jim Irwin, Alan Shepard and Pete Conrad … that’s right, there’s nine left!”
Does that worry or upset him?
“Well, we are all getting older, obviously, but the thing that’s worrying me is that we haven’t been back. Gene Cernan was the last man on the Moon and that’s thirty years ago. So you think about that, and that’s a startling thing to me, that we haven’t been back there.”
Gordon had particular reason to feel disappointed at the cancellation of the final three Apollo missions, because he was due to command 18. He could have been handed 17, in fact, because NASA was coming under huge pressure to send a scientist up and his Lunar Module pilot, the geologist Dr. Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, was the only one. In the end, they took Schmitt and left the commander behind. I ask how he felt about that.
“Aw … I accepted it. I had a lotta fun with Gene Cernan. I used to arm wrestle him for 17, knowing that 18 wasn’t gonna fly. I kept telling everyone, ‘You can’t take my Lunar Module pilot – I gotta go with him!’ But I stayed. After 12, I probably coulda done like Pete and Al did, gone on to something else like Skylab, but I wanted to go that last sixty miles, so I stayed with Apollo, flew backup on 15. Then 18, 19 and 20 were cancelled.”
Is this something that still haunts you?
“Not really. You mean not going on 18?”
No, not going the extra sixty miles.
“Nooo, not really. I had my turn, my time. And was very fortunate to have done that. There’s no regrets.”
Gordon left NASA in 1972 and was invited by a friend to become executive vice president of the New Orleans Saints football team. One of the other astronauts has pointed out that many of them were offered prestige jobs that they had no training for after returning from space. Gordon was with the Saints for five years, then moved into “the oil patch” back in Houston. For a while he worked with the famous oil-rig troubleshooter Red Adair. Later, he went back to aerospace and into computers. He’s talking excitedly about the engineering challenges of raising North Sea platforms when he abruptly looks up.
“Herbie!”
A stocky black military man has approached and is introducing a colleague, evidently a pilot. There is instant bonhomie as they discuss bases they were stationed at and the specifications of planes they’ve flown. Just by being pilots, they share something which the rest of us could never share. Gordon doesn’t boast about the speed records he set, or seem to assume any kind of seniority. Pilots are pilots. Everyone else is a not-pilot.
When he’s finished, I still want to know why he’s here.
“Oh, I enjoy getting out and meeting people. It gives me something to do.”
A middle-aged woman appears, grinning broadly.
“I want a real hero.” She beams. “The real guy who went into space! How much is that?”
Dick explains the widget system (“they won’t let me handle money!”) and she goes off to buy one. She is replaced by a younger Australian woman, who points at the image of him sitting on an Agena rocket during his Gemini 11 spacewalk.
“Is that really you?”
Yes, he tells her, that was in 1966.
“Wow,” she replies. “That was when Star Trek was getting going. An amazing decade.”
She asks about the sensation of hanging in space and he doesn’t really answer her, perhaps because all he remembers is being sweat-blind, exhausted and scared, so she moves on to the space suit. It looks kinda clumsy. Yes, ma’am, he tells her as he signs her picture, it was. And the first woman is back, proffering her widget.
“So you were on Apollo 11?”
An announcement comes over the PA about “Syd” taking a five-minute break from signing and a groan rises from the crowd in front of one of the tables.
We talk about families. Like most of the early astronauts, Gordon is from classic white working-class stock, with Scottish and Irish ancestry and a great-grandmother who was one of the first European women in the Pacific Northwest. The family homesteaded with grants from President Grover Cleveland in the nineteenth century and worked hard to scrape a living.
Did he catch the flying bug at an early age? I want to know.
“No, never did,” he replies. “That happened because of the Korean War.”
Like Ed, he was in the naval reserve while at university in Washington and had two cousins who’d been World War II pilots. Rather than be drafted, he decided to enlist and learn to fly. He was sent to Pensacola as a naval cadet.
“And I fell in love with an airplane. End of story.” He laughs.
He has six kids from his first marriage of twenty-seven years, half of whom went into the Navy, like him, though one of his four sons was killed in a car accident in 1983. His eldest daughter is a nurse, he tells me, and the youngest, born in 1961, is married to an FBI instructor and lives in Virginia. “They’re all kind of East Coast types.” He smiles. So far, they’ve given him seventeen grandchildren. I wonder what his kids thought of having an astronaut for a dad and he tells me that most of the astronaut families lived in Houston suburbs near NASA HQ, surrounded by other NASA people – they didn’t think anything of it.
“I’ll tell you what, when my eldest son was eight or nine years old in 1963, his teacher overheard this conversation between my kid and another boy, where they were getting acquainted and Rick asked, ‘What does your dad do?’ The other kid said, ‘He’s a sheriff,’ and Rick went, ‘Wow, he’s a sheriff? Does he wear a badge? Does he wear a gun?!’ and got all excited. Then the other kid asked Rick what his did and he replied, ‘Aw, he’s just an astronaut.’ True story! I always say, well, that puts everything in perspective. I thought that was pretty good.”
When I repeat this to the daughter of another astronaut, she will snigger that her father used to tell the same story. Asked whether he experienced any kind of post-space comedown, Gordon shrugs.
“Naw. Why put yourself through the bother of comparing? Why would you want to torture yourself by thinking, ‘My God, I’ll never be able to do anything like that again’?”
But some of the others seemed to.
“Yes, that’s true. And I think that’s very unfortunate.”
Has he found that kind of excitement anywhere else? I ask, and the answer catapults back.
“No, you never would! You never would.”
Then I ask if he still flies.
“No, I, I … when I could afford it, I didn’t have the time, and now that I’ve got the time, I can’t afford it. Uncle Sam paid for most of my flying.”
And a bell rings in my head. We assume that Uncle Sam handsomely rewarded the single combat warriors who hung their asses far out over the line and did one of the most amazing things that any of us can imagine. But no. Not at all. When they went to the Moon, they received the same per diem compensation as they would have for being away from base in Bakersfield: eight dollars a day, before various deductions (like for accommodation, because the government was providing the bed in the spaceship). The Apollo 11 Command Module pilot Mike Collins had considered submitting an invoice for travel expenses at the standard eight cents per mile as a joke, which came to around $80,000, but found that someone had already tried this – only to be presented with a bill for one launch-ready Saturn V rocket, at about $185 million. The rest of the time, the military-sourced astronauts were paid according to rank. Most were captains, pulling around seventeen grand per annum by the end of the Sixties – not great for a highly educated and skilled thirty-nine-year-old, even then. Some have since learned to trade with varying degrees of dignity on their status as Apollo astronauts, but a cruel hierarchy exists, whereby the presence, signature, image of a Moonwalker is worth vastly more than those who sat out the last sixty miles. The irony of this is that the CM pilots were assigned to the job by virtue of their superior experience to the LM pilots who went all the way: Deke Slayton had a rule that no rookie could take charge of the Command Module, their ticket back to Earth. That’s why Dick Gordon is here, as adornment to the pretend cosmic heroes, and the junior member of the Apollo 12 team, Alan Bean, who’d never been into space before that flight, is not. When I tell one trader of space memorabilia about having found Gordon playing third spear carrier to Walter Koenig, he shakes his head and laments:
“Well, Dick’s got to work for a living because he wasn’t a Moonwalker. That’s what it is. There’s a very sharp line between the Moonwalkers, who are very collectable, and the Command Module pilots.”
So the Command Module pilots really were on their own when the space programme walls came tumbling down. Before I’ve finished my travels through Apollo I’ll find Al Worden, the Apollo 15 CM pilot who published a book of poetry inspired by his trip, sitting among topless tabloid models and ex–soap stars at a fearsomely depressing autograph show in Northampton, England. The fact is that we, the people, make fickle pension-fund managers, and I wonder if that’s why some of the CM pilots have since fallen into a silence more deafening even than Neil Armstrong’s.
I ask what’s the most important thing Gordon has learned up to now and the question throws him.
“Hm. I’ve never been asked that question and have not given it that much thought. Huh. It’s an intriguing question. What have I learned? I’ll have to think about that …”
An Asian woman steps up, accompanied by her American husband. She tells us that she’s a doctor and her patients laugh because her office is plastered with nothing but pictures pertaining to space exploration. She’s in family practice and her husband’s a surgeon and they’ve come not for Chekov or Major Don, but for Dick. Genuinely thrilled to meet him, she sends her man off to get a picture and when he returns, he twinkles.
“You know, the only job I ever wanted to do more than mine was yours.”
Dick is modest: “Well, it was a rare opportunity, I’ll tell you that.”
There’s something touchingly pure and childlike about the surgeon’s enthusiasm. The Cold War doesn’t figure in it and neither does the cult of celebrity or even ambition in the generally accepted sense. They go away and Gordon, unprompted, returns to
the question of what he’s learned. The extent to which it’s gnawing at him is beginning to make me feel bad for asking. I tell him to forget it, it’s not important. But he won’t. Maybe the value of teamwork, he suggests. Or of being goal-oriented.
“I don’t know. That’s a damn interesting question. I hadn’t really thought about it. What have I learned? Ha!”
I ask whether he has any regrets?
“Well, we devoted so much time to our work. I turned around one day and my kids had gone. They’d grown up, and I missed it. I missed a lot of it. And if I have any regrets, that would be one of them, that I missed their maturation process as they were becoming young adults.”
Maturation process. You can take the man out of NASA, but …
A young Trekkie with eyes like Ping-Pong balls turns up and asks questions which suggest that he knows very little about the Moon landings and half believes that they never happened.
“Space is always interesting and, as sci-fi fans, we always feel that we can’t get there soon enough,” he declares, before loping off.
Getting ready to go, I idly ask what hotel he’s staying in and he tells me he’s at the Tropicana, because his stepson works security there and got him a special rate: twenty-nine dollars a night – pretty good, huh? Someone walks by and cracks a joke about (Senator) John Glenn, who, as a member of the Mercury 7, became the third American in space and recently flew on the shuttle at age seventy-seven. We get to talking about Mercury and, without meaning to, Gordon says something that remains with me for the rest of my trip. I tell him that I hate confined spaces and can’t imagine climbing into one of those tiny capsules. He looks at me with mild disbelief.