by Andrew Smith
“Well, I don’t know,” he says with a shrug, “you’ve got the whole Universe outside your window.”
I shake his hand.
But one more thing: I wonder whether the relationships between him and his former colleagues have changed over the years, now that the competition is over? He thinks for a moment.
“Well, there was a tremendous amount of competition until you’d get on a flight crew, but once you were on, that was it.”
This is not quite true, at least not for everyone. I try again. So relations are pretty much the same as they were thirty years ago? The answer makes me roar with delight.
“No, I think they are. Basically, we’re all reasonable folk and good friends. Some we like better than others, just like real life. And then of course there’s Buzz Aldrin.”
I leave a gap for him to elaborate, but he doesn’t. All he does is glance balefully down at my minidisc recorder as it whirrs away on the table.
Then of course there’s Buzz Aldrin.
Thinking about gordon in the desert.
Rather than fly, I decided to drive to LA through the Mojave Desert, which is much more beautiful than I remember from childhood. It’s the end of the day and the sky’s painting a singed rainbow of purple, gold, vermilion across the sand, while clouds flame and the jagged mountains point like spectators at a firework display toward a perfect sliver of silvery moon. It’s majestic even from the road, but these teeming highways still remind me of the fear I felt as a boy during the oil crisis of 1973; of sitting in the back of the car for what seemed like hours just to get a few gallons; of the ill-temper and selfishness that seemed to erupt around the pumps, a tiny taste of hell.
So I pulled off the highway and into the wilderness, and in three hours of driving, walking, wandering I’ve seen only one other car. I’m aware that somewhere out there is Edwards Air Force Base, where many of the lunar astronauts trained as test pilots in the 1950s under the command of Chuck Yeager, who a few years previously had broken the sound barrier in the squat, screaming Bell X-1 rocket plane. Prior to that, many experts had considered the sound barrier absolute, a wall beyond which our human frames could not survive, but Yeager proved them wrong and was a hero to the young Apollo men, who still had no idea of the magnified destiny that awaited them.
I’ve wanted to know what going to the Moon meant to those who went, and in relation to this Dick Gordon and the Command Module pilots already look more significant than I’d imagined – despite the fact that Gordon consciously revealed little. A lunar orbit took just under two hours to ride, but forty-seven minutes of each was spent in complete isolation as the CSM passed around the far side, bringing a solitude that one NASA employee memorably described as the most profound any human being had experienced “since Adam.” They were the ones who came nearest to the imaginings of popular culture at the time, as expressed in songs like Elton John and Bernie Taupin’s “Rocket Man” and David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” or films like Tarkovsky’s Solaris (released in 1972 and since reimagined by Steven Soderbergh), where the gulf between terror and exultation collapses: a state best evoked on Earth either by drowning or going insane. Neither is this the fancy of a few artists: in his book Carrying the Fire, the Apollo 11 CM pilot Michael Collins reveals that his aviator hero, Charles Lindbergh, wrote to him, saying:
“I watched every minute of the [first] walk-out, and certainly it was of indescribable interest. But it seems to me that you had an experience of in some ways greater profundity … you have experienced an aloneness unknown to man before.”
In describing the experience of being on the far side, in the dark, facing out toward the impenetrable depths of the cosmos and separated from all humanity by the bulk of the Moon – out of sight and unreachable and utterly, utterly alone – Collins actually used the word “exultation.” In the early stages of this aloneness, he was heard saying nervously to his Moon-bound partners as they drifted away in the LM, “Keep talking to me, guys.” Finally, he grew to like this feeling of solitude, but paid a high price for it, admitting afterwards that “I just can’t get excited about things the way I could before Apollo 11; I seem gripped by an earthly ennui which I don’t relish, but which I seem powerless to prevent.”
Collins is very rarely heard of or seen in public these days, and hasn’t been for many years. On film, I will eventually hear a couple of unidentified Command Module pilots confessing more frustration at their fate than Gordon was prepared to allow in Vegas. One says, “I was disappointed. I wanted to go with them so bad I could taste it.” Another laments: “I wish I could go down there with them. You may not talk about it very much, but part of your training is coming back by yourself if anything happens [to the LM]. Wish the damn thing could hold three people …” All the same, there was wonderment in the situation. Ed Mitchell’s crewmate Stu Roosa was fascinated with the way his craft would plunge into the Moon’s shadow and impregnable darkness once every hour and a quarter, as though crossing into another dimension. It was a darkness and an aloneness you could feel, he said, which seemed to enter you as you drifted deeper into it, playing tricks with your vision and sending a little chill down the spine. The Apollo 15 CMP, Al Worden, felt the far-side aloneness, too, but couldn’t stop looking at the stars which shone so bright back there, wondering how the sky could hold so many of them. They were everywhere.
Also emerging is a broader story about the twentieth century. I’ve been reading a book called The Greatest Generation by the broadcaster Tom Brokaw. He writes about that group of men and women who came of age during the Great Depression, during which thirteen million Americans were out of work, who sacrificed their early adulthoods to World War II, then came home and worked to revolutionize the U.S. economy, leading it into what economists describe as the most spectacular period of economic growth the world has ever seen.
They didn’t achieve this in a vacuum, of course. Brokaw doesn’t linger on it, but the fact of the matter is that the U.S. economy emerged fit and powerful from World War II, able to muster two-thirds of the world’s industrial production while the rest of the planet was in tatters. By the end of the Fifties, the whole of the industrialized world had joined in the spree and those members of Brokaw’s “Greatest Generation” who’d survived the carnage in Europe and the Pacific were about to enter an age where, to paraphrase John Updike, the chief question would be not “Why?” but “Why not?” As it happens, this question would reach a kind of Day-Glo apogee in 1968–9, before receiving a most eloquent and unequivocal answer at the end of 1972. The precise period in which Apollo was travelling to the Moon.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
The wonderful irony is that these returning war heroes gave birth to the group we now know as “baby boomers,” who were born immediately after their parents’ return from that long war. Statisticians will tell you that the baby boom carried on until 1964, but in terms of shared experience it ended long before then. The “boomers” entered a world of plenty; of full employment and vastly expanded educational opportunities, in which the security their parents had dreamt into being was taken for granted, even despised. The shock of the 1950s had been that the upper- and middle-class young chose to take their style from the urban poor. Rock ’n’ roll was black slang for “sex.” Jeans had been workers’ wear. The novel term “teenager” was coined during this time and the notion of youth martyrdom was born – because youth was no longer seen as a transitional state: it was an ideal, which found its pithiest distillation in the line “Hope I die before I get old” from the Who’s “My Generation.” Thus the “generation gap,” a source of much hand-wringing from the mid-Fifties on, was born. Between 1955 and 1973, the value of record sales in the USA rose from $277 million to in excess of $2 billion.
Significantly for the lunar story, this combined with the booming economy to produce a veneration of all things “new,” for which “Space Age” came to be shorthand. Modern “consumer” society was born at this point, as design ecl
ipsed function and every new product was obliged to pretend not just to improvement, but to revolution. By the end of the 1960s, Richard Nixon could be found sitting alone in the White House, scratching notes to himself about what kind of presidency he wanted his to be, but the notes didn’t say things like “end Vietnam War” or “sort out Palestine mess.” They said: “Compassionate, Bold, New, Courageous … Zest for the job (not lonely but awesome) … Progress – Participation, Trustworthy, Open-minded.” Impressions and images. You wouldn’t have found anything like this in Ike Eisenhower’s drawer. But Ike’s world was no more. This was the Space Age.
The desert’s dark now and I pull into the laser train of headlights on Highway 40, heading for an overnight stay in Barstow, on the Mojave’s edge, where the crisp morning finds wind-driven clouds racing shadows down the hills and that peculiarly dissonant groan of a freight train creeping across the desert floor, as evocative as a Miles Davis solo and echo of a time when, as Mailer had it, “the wind was the message of America.” I could stay forever, but instead press some CDs into the car stereo and set off again for LA, where I hope to be meeting the second man on the moon, Buzz Aldrin. I’ve chosen music to evoke the period I’m about to enter and as I pull out of the Comfort Inn parking lot, the Strawberry Alarm Clock are singing a song called “Sit with the Guru.” The chorus asks hopefully: “How many tomorrows can you see?”
That was recorded in 1967. The tomorrow I see will be Wednesday, September 11, 2002, the first anniversary of the World Trade Center outrage. All week I’ve been wondering whether Aldrin realized the significance of the date when he chose it.
A treat: my favourite hotel, The Hyatt in Sunset Boulevard. Little Richard used to live in a suite on the top floor and guests of my acquaintance are forever claiming to have stumbled across him in the lift or wailing “Tutti Frutti” in the bar when there wasn’t much on TV. I was asked to meet with him once and he kept leaving cryptic messages on my voice mail, two floors below, about not being able to hook up before dusk on account of his religious beliefs, and the importance of consulting with his “friend” about the most propitious time for our congress. His giggle could have been composed by Rachmaninov.
I was wondering whether the greatest rock and roller of them all still stayed here as I went through the ritual of switching on CNN and hanging up my shirts. I’d moved to the bathroom to fire up the shower when I heard the words intermittently:
“… this afternoon … the seventy-two-year-old former astronaut Buzz Aldrin … as he left a Los Angeles hotel … Beverly Hills police arrived at the scene …”
Skin crawling, I rushed back into the bedroom, then stood, stared, tried to catch hold of what was being said … almost squealed with delight! The story went like this:
Aldrin’s gone to the Luxe Hotel to be interviewed by a Japanese TV crew, who turn out to be making a programme about the lunar-hoax theory. Whether by invitation or not, a second camera crew arrives, led by a man who – mark you this – thrusts a Bible in the former astronaut’s face and demands that he put his right hand on it and swear that he really went to the Moon. At this point, Buzz remembers a pressing prior engagement, assays an emergency egress, and is being escorted across the road outside by his stepdaughter when the conspiracist appears behind him, making the same demand as before. By some accounts, the younger man pokes the older man with the Good Book, perhaps even calls him some names – “You’re a phony, Aldrin” – stuff like that. But the point is that by all accounts, the response of the wiry former space hero is to spin on his heels, draw back his fist, and land one square on his tormentor’s wagging chin. Five feet ten and 160 pounds going at six-two and 250 … a cheer goes up from the stands! Except that now the Good Book’s owner, a Mr. Bart Sibrel of Nashville, Tennessee, is threatening to file a criminal assault complaint. He says his jaw hurts and, man, in this I do believe him. Tomorrow morning’s Los Angeles Times will contain a picture taken at the point of impact and the expression on Aldrin’s face is simply beyond the reach of words. Slightly blurred, he looks like Kermit the Frog auditioning for The Exorcist: as though his head is about to turn inside out. I’ll spend the next two days trying to track Sibrel down in order to get a firsthand view of the damage, but he seems to have disappeared from the face of the Earth. Abducted by aliens, I shouldn’t wonder.
And then there’s Buzz Aldrin!
The word “maverick” does him no justice at all. In Carrying the Fire, which was published in 1974 and is still by far the best astronaut memoir, Mike Collins supplies pen portraits of most of his Astronaut Corps colleagues. Not all of them are as polite as you might expect, Aldrin’s least of all.
“Heavy, man, heavy,” is what Collins says. “Would make a champion chess player; always thinks several moves ahead. If you don’t understand what he’s talking about today, you will tomorrow or the next day. Fame has not worn well on Buzz. I think he resents not being the first man on the Moon more than he appreciates being the second.”
This contains a hint of the spectacular fall from grace that would follow Apollo 11 and was little understood at NASA. Much later, Collins laments:
“[Neil] never transmits anything but the surface layer, and that only sparingly. I like him, but I don’t know what to make of him, or how to get to know him better. He doesn’t seem willing to meet anyone halfway … Buzz, on the other hand, is more approachable; in fact, for reasons I cannot fully explain, it is me that seems to be trying to keep him at arm’s length. I have the feeling that he would probe me for weaknesses, and that makes me uncomfortable.”
He adds that “a closer relationship, while certainly not necessary for the safe or happy completion of a space flight, would seem more ‘normal’ to me,” and that “even as a self-acknowledged loner, I feel a bit freakish about our tendency as a crew to transfer only essential information, rather than thoughts or feelings.”
Best and most revealing of all, though, is the passage where Collins considers the three men’s relative neatness, saying:
“I am probably the sloppiest, and I consider myself neat. Neil is neat. Buzz is not only neat, but almost a dandy. When he is decked out in full civilian regalia, he is a sight to behold. On more than one occasion I have seen him and his newly pressed iridescent suit festooned with more totems than one would believe possible. Once I counted ten.”
The thing to note here is that Collins was counting. Aldrin was dashingly handsome, extremely bright, but a very poor public speaker and communicator. His pulse at takeoff was 110 bpm, the lowest of any Apollo astronaut, but around the Astronaut Office he was considered to be an agitator and political game-player, though he certainly wasn’t the only one and looks actually to have been rather clumsy and unskilled at manoeuvring in the subtle, back-slapping, one-of-the-guys way that men like David Scott and Gene Cernan excelled at. He wasn’t one of the guys and nor, for that matter, were either of his Apollo 11 crewmates. The German-born Pad Leader Guenter Wendt (known to the astronauts as Pad Führer, ruler of the launchpad) will tell you that, for all Deke Slayton’s efforts, the Apollo 11 crew never gelled, and remained remote from each other throughout. You’ll still find Apollo vets muttering darkly about Aldrin, though. Wendt is not courting controversy when he avers that “some considered him to be arrogant … he became quite a bit of a loner and not too many people cosied up to him.” Nevertheless, people will pay his fee of $250 per autograph ($500 if the item has already been signed by another astronaut), where most others charge $20 to $40. Or, like Armstrong and Collins, refuse to sign altogether. He’s a curious icon indeed and I go to bed feeling more than ever intrigued by him.
The morning of September 11, we’re at Ground Zero on TV, listening to a litany of names of the people who died in and around the Twin Towers. I’m struck by how many of them are Italian, Irish and Hispanic, and can’t help noticing, as in most situations, come to think of it, how many Smiths there are. In the time that I’ve been conscious of the world, there’s been no shortage of events to burn a
memory into most people’s minds of where they were when they heard about them (Martin, Bobby, Elvis, John, Diana, the crew of the shuttle Challenger). Then there are the two which nearly everyone recalls receiving news of: the first Moon landing and this. And today they’re coming together for me. Strange isn’t the word. It’s hard not to notice that of all these world-shaking events, the landing of Apollo 11 is the only one that doesn’t involve death.
There are other connections, too. Turning right into the traffic on Sunset, I find myself breathing the words to “For What It’s Worth” by Buffalo Springfield, the Sixties group which launched Neil Young and Steven Stills. I must have heard the song a thousand times, but only on the way from Vegas did I learn that the lyric is about the LAPD’s violent dispersal of an anti-Vietnam demonstration right here on the Strip, in 1966, just a year after thirty-four people died during riots in nearby Watts. Frank Zappa, who called his daughter Moon and had a father who worked on missile systems at Edwards while Neil Armstrong was flying rocket planes there (and used to bring home mercury and the pesticide DDT for his son to play with), wrote about the same episode on his satyric opus We’re Only in It for the Money – but it was the Springfield tune, with its chorus that began “Stop, children, what’s that sound?” – the sound being gunshots – that became a rallying cry for West Coast students. It’s on my mind because the incomprehension and paranoia it expressed can be felt in the air today, thirty-six years later.
And yet, 1966 was a good year for Buzz, one of the best.
His sister gave him the nickname “Buzz.” She was only eighteen months old when he was born a few months into the Great Depression, on January 30, 1930. The third child and only son, he was known to the family as “brother,” but when Fay Ann said it, it came out as “Buzzer,” which evolved into Buzz. He’s since made her mispronunciation official by deed poll.