by Andrew Smith
He was the only son of a vaultingly ambitious oilman of Swedish stock, a wartime colonel who made for a stern and remote father, and a mother whose maiden name – and you couldn’t have made this up – was Marion Moon. They were well off, and he recalls the chief influence on his young life as having been a black housekeeper named Alice. “Her enthusiasm for my world made it grow, and more by demonstration than by words she taught me tolerance,” he says in a now out-of-print autobiography. At first he was an average student, but averageness was not well received by his father. He claims never to have been socially adept, but by the time he left high school, his grades were good enough to get him to West Point, where he excelled academically and athletically. He shot down two MIG-15s in Korea, returned to take a doctorate in Manned Space Rendezvous at MIT and joined NASA’s third group of astronauts in 1963.
Nevertheless, at the start of 1966 Aldrin was one of the seven from twenty-seven active Astronaut Corps members who hadn’t been allocated a seat on Gemini, making his chances of flying Apollo look very slim indeed. Feeling himself to be an “odd man out” and suspecting a Navy bias in crew selection, he tried pressing his case with Slayton, but that seemed to make matters worse – until fate intervened in the most bitterly equivocal fashion. Adjoining the Aldrin garden in Houston was that of Charlie Bassett and family. The women of the households were friends and the children played together, while Bassett and Buzz got along fine. But one February morning Bassett and another corps member, Elliott See, took off to St. Louis in a T-38 trainer jet. The pair were scheduled to fly Gemini 9 and were going to visit the capsule, but on their approach, with the weather worsening, they misjudged their rate of descent and ended up hitting the roof of the hangar where the spacecraft was being assembled. Both men were killed and in the ensuing reshuffle of seats, Aldrin wound up with the very last place in the programme, on Gemini 12.
Buzz seized the opportunity with both hands. Charged with following the near fatally flawed spacewalks of Gene Cernan and Dick Gordon, and with proving that tasks beyond merely wafting about could be safely performed in space – because if they couldn’t, Apollo was in trouble – he disdained Cernan’s view that “brute force” was the answer to working in zero gravity. Instead, he conducted an incisive analysis of the problems and showed great invention in designing tools and techniques that would make working in space easier. The upshot was that, where death shadowed previous EVAs, this one went like clockwork. Now Apollo was on and Kraft, Slayton et al. could hardly fail to recognize such application and intelligence. A friend’s gift of death had let Buzz in and if the engineers’ nickname for him, “Dr. Rendezvous,” contained a hint of sarcasm, it hardly mattered anymore. He was named to the backup crew of Apollo 8, which led to the “prime” crew of 11. He still didn’t expect to be first to the Moon, until one day Slayton called the crew into his office and announced, “You’re it.” Not wanting to break the news to his wife over the phone, he waited until she picked him up in a station wagon full of dirty laundry later in the day. According to him, he told her in a Laundromat off NASA Road 1. He claims to have spent the long Fourth of July weekend before the flight dismantling and reassembling a dishwasher.
There are a number of reasons why Aldrin is not every Apollo astronaut’s cup of tea. The first is his behind-the-scenes campaign to be first on the Moon. To a degree, his frustration with being second was understandable. Up to 11, commanders had kept with tradition by staying in their craft while others stepped out. NASA tried to deny it afterwards, but the early checklists showed Aldrin leaving the LM first and my sources confirm that the media were apprised accordingly. What happened? Turnill and Collins both suggest that Armstrong exercised his power and commander’s prerogative to change the plan. On the other hand, Chris Kraft maintains that a summit attended by himself, Deke Slayton, MSC director Robert Gilruth and his deputy, George Low, considered Armstrong better equipped to handle the clamour when he got back – though they still had scant idea of how clamorous that clamour would be. Aldrin lobbied backstage and, perhaps more significant, so did his father, who was furious to find his approaches rebuffed. Buzz admits that the old man “planted his own goals and aspirations in me,” but it looks as though he did more than that: he tried to enforce them. Both Aldrins suspected that Armstrong had been favoured because he joined the space programme as a civilian and was thus untouched by the continuing debacle in Vietnam. As a last resort, Aldrin Junior approached his commander and suggested that the change of plan was unfair. Of that conversation he says:
“[Armstrong was] a no-frills kind of guy who didn’t talk a whole lot, but usually said what he meant. But there was a more complex side to Neil … Neil hemmed and hawed for a moment and then looked away, breaking eye contact with a coolness I’d never seen in him before.”
NASA explained the decision by saying that the commander would be closest to the door and it would be difficult for the LM pilot to get past him. Aldrin claims to have experienced relief once the decision was final, but some say his mood darkened thereafter. It has since been noted that he took no photographs of Armstrong on the surface – none – and that the only image of the commander is as a reflection in Aldrin’s visor. At one point, Armstrong actually called his junior over to snap him by a commemorative plaque he’d just unveiled, but the LM pilot, hilariously, barked back that he was too busy. There are two big laughs in “Deep Space Homer,” the episode of The Simpsons in which Aldrin makes a guest appearance: the first occurs at the start, when Homer almost expires with boredom at being forced to watch another shuttle launch on TV (“the lion’s share of this flight will be devoted to the study of weightlessness on tiny screws,” enthuses the commentator); the second comes with the embarrassed silence following Buzz’s introduction as “the, er, second man on the Moon.”
“But remember, second comes right after first!” he chirps desperately.
The other reason Buzz never made homecoming queen in the Astronaut Office is that he wrote about the rise and fall in a brave book called Return to Earth, which hit bookshops as early as 1973, when the Apollo aura was still fresh. In a society of men used to being presented and received as omnipotent heroes, where divulgence was anathema, it’s easy to see why the book caused alarm. Some of it is divine. Among the fruitier revelations were:
1. That the constant emphasis on setting “records” in space was PR-driven.
2. That the spacewalks had not all gone to plan and lives had been in jeopardy.
3. That there had been arguments about who would step onto the Moon first.
4. That the first thing he did when he got there was kick the dust and watch it sweep away in great arcs; the second thing, while the world watched in rapture, was pee.
5. That the condoms they’d used for collecting urine were a source of great anguish because “our legs weren’t the only things that atrophied in space.”
6. That hydrogen bubbles in the water supply they used to rehydrate food had given them the farts and Columbia’s interior didn’t smell so good (there was “a considerable fragrance”) by the time they got home.
7. That members of the corps, including himself, had failed to resist the advances of space groupies and some – including himself – had conducted affairs.
8. That some of the astronauts had used their status to form questionable business alliances which would land them in trouble.
9. That he didn’t know all the answers and was perfectly capable of being scared – though mostly by things other than spaceflight, like the media and speeches.
10. A hint that Armstrong’s “one small step” spiel might have originated with a NASA press officer after all.
By the end, we’re very prepared to believe Aldrin’s contention that diplomacy isn’t his long suit, but there’s also plenty of stuff to remind us that they were all improvising. For instance, there is the description of being in the “mobile quarantine unit” on the deck of the USS Hornet after splashdown, ready to be addressed by President Nixon
through a broad, narrow band of glass when the national anthem pipes up, forcing the trio to stand. “We didn’t know that three astronauts would stand up and present three crotches to the world,” Aldrin laments, adding that they sat down afterwards in a tailspin of fear that their flies might have been open. And how delightful that, having informed his wife of the Moon trip in a Laundromat, Aldrin’s first words to her now were “Joan, would you bring me some Jockey shorts tomorrow morning?” because he was annoyed to have been supplied with boxers by NASA. Her response was to blurt “Oh, thank God!” and burst into tears. Hardly Bogie and Bacall, but touching nonetheless.
More serious is Aldrin’s account of the rock-style “Giant Step” tour, a global PR junket which he, his fellow crew members and their wives were hauled through upon release from quarantine. “When I think of that tour, I think of liquor,” is what he says. More specifically, he recalls Armstrong’s disapproval – later withdrawn when he danced with Miss Congo in the Congo; Joan’s jealousy at a party thrown in Rome by the curvy actress Gina Lollobrigida; the trio’s thwarted desire to get out and speak to people, rather than attending endless dry diplomatic receptions; how the women drew closer to each other while the men drifted apart; his and Joan’s sudden apprehension, at a reception in Norway, that he had been used and discarded and that life was never going to be the same again, at which point she cried, then he cried. “I felt all six of us were fakes and fools for allowing ourselves to be convinced by some strange concept of duty to be sent through all these countries for the sake of propaganda, nothing more, nothing less,” he says dolorously. The drama acquires a surreal edge through being played out against an impossibly glamorous backdrop. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain, Aldrin reports, was “surprisingly small and buxom,” while Joan issued him an ultimatum to stay home more or move out after a birthday bash held by the despotic Shah of Iran. None of this had anything to do with the lives they’d known before.
The socially relaxed Collins remembers his crewmate growing more and more distant, retreating at times into “stony-faced silence,” just as Aldrin had earlier remembered reading a sci-fi story as a kid, where some voyagers go to the Moon but return home insane: it had given him nightmares, and the nightmares left a shadow which followed him on the real-life voyage he eventually took, so that when “flicker-flashes” of light began to appear in the corner of his vision, his first, barely conscious thought was that the Universe was coming for him. Was there fear in his voice when he first mentioned them on the flight? Is that what irritated Armstrong so much? Come to that, was Armstrong afraid of them, too? Either way, the Universe did get to him. Aldrin came back and blew like a supernova.
The Air Force made him commandant of the aerospace school at Edwards and he left his family for Marianne, the woman he’d been having an affair with for some years, but both situations collapsed in a fog of despondency. Return to Earth ends on a hopeful note, with him boldly submitting to treatment in a psychiatric hospital – so spelling the ruination of any future Air Force career, despite his father’s continued efforts to get him promoted to general – and trying to start over again with Joan and the family. Heartbreakingly, this rapprochement with life didn’t last. Aldrin eventually returned to the other woman, but the union was brief.
In fact, he’d been suffering from severe depression and alcoholism. He was forty-two and had no idea where he was going or what to do with the very different void, the existential void, that now yawned before him. It must have felt terrifying, as though the Earth were punishing him for his impudence in leaving it.
Ed Mitchell was equipped to face this. Buzz Aldrin wasn’t. There was no safe place to stand, let alone fly. He worked on an innovative design for the space shuttle, but it was abandoned; then as a director of an insurance company and a cable TV firm. He criticized other astronauts for their business dealings, which endeared him to no one, and launched an idealistic youth forum aimed at bridging the generation gap, but it never quite caught fire. After the breakdown that precipitated his departure from Edwards, he developed a fear of sleeping in darkness. Joan said he judged himself too harshly. It’s strange that photos from this period show him smiling, with a fashionable beard, looking every inch a matinee idol. The Space Age had found its Marilyn.
The assistant’s e-mail said 10 AM and it’s 10 AM now. I’ve mistimed my entry into the swank heart of Wilshire – how long is this bloody road anyway? – and am angry with myself by the time I spot the marble and gold block where Aldrin lives with his redoubtable third wife, Lois. I locate a barely sufficient parking space around the corner, almost spark a fight by ramming the back of a mobile java van while trying to squeeze into it, then apologize profusely and break like a thief beneath a paranoid 9/11 sky full of circling helicopters.
First the slightly bad news. Years of propaganda from those post-hippy Californian grade school teachers have left me with a residual mistrust of ties and collars, those flashy trappings of The Man, but they say Buzz is a snappy dresser, a disciple of precision, so today I will be, too. A trip to the Beverly Center netted a grey Agnès B suit as worn by Harvey Keitel in Reservoir Dogs, a brown Burro shirt – chosen after several carefully considered changes – and some proper Patrick Cox shoes. A bronze silk tie purchased last-dash from the hotel boutique this morning and knotted with the help of the concierge is the prime cause of my lateness. Now I present myself to a liveried receptionist after sprinting three hundred yards in a funk, looking for all my efforts like a sales rep ejected from a strip joint for panting too hard.
So to the worse news.
“Hello. I’ve come to see Dr. Aldrin,” I announce.
The receptionist looks at me blankly.
“Who?”
“Er, Dr. Aldrin. Am I in the wrong place?”
My head swims. I don’t believe it. I am in the wrong place. But wait: the receptionist’s lips begin to curl upward, until he is grinning broadly.
“Oh, hold on – you mean Buzz?”
Good news, until he calls upstairs to be told that Aldrin’s assistant has been trying to reach me in order to postpone our meeting in light of yesterday’s unfortunate events. Bad news … except that, seeing as I’m here, we might as well carry on as planned. Good news!
The elevator won’t stop at the correct floor, because security concerns dictate that you need special dispensation to get out there, and a member of the staff has to come up and arrange it for me. Once out, there’s a private hallway leading to a broad, glossy white door with gold fittings. It opens, and there, backlit through its frame, glowing like an eclipse through the halo of light – the man carries his own corona, for Christ’s sake – stands Dr. Buzz Aldrin, tanned and smiling and wearing nothing more than a NASA T-shirt that must once have been white, and the smallest pair of small blue satin running shorts that I have ever seen. His feet, unlike mine, are bare. On the way in, I ask if he’d like me to follow his example and remove my shoes in deference to his spotless natural fibre carpet, but he chuckles and soothes:
“Naw, don’t worry. We’re just not as traditional as maybe you guys are.”
Lord, save me from myself.
Aldrin has good legs for a seventy-two-year-old and looks astonishingly fit. He’s been sober for many years now and spends his time agitating for a resumption of “manned” space exploration, struggling to scare up investment for his futuristic projects, making lucrative public appearances and, of late, writing novels. He walks me through the living room and seats me on one of two cloudy cream sofas, then offers coffee and stalks off to the adjoining kitchen to fix it. In his absence, I gaze around the large, high-ceilinged room in what must be a very spacious apartment, neatly adorned with Moon-themed awards and paintings and expensive-looking furniture, and my mind reaches back to Dick Gordon signing autographs for ten bucks a pop in Vegas – which is perhaps why the Chaplinesque commotion coming from the kitchen takes a while to register. After a brief interval, punctuated by more clatter, Aldrin calls through to a
sk whether I’d like milk or creamer, but the question seems to be rhetorical, because he clearly has no idea where to find either. In the end, he’s forced to swallow pride and call Lois, who sweeps in, petite but crackling electric with her gold-rimmed specs and bonnet of tightly curled grey hair. She calls him “Buzzy” and hugs him like a naughty five-year-old and he seems to melt in her embrace, appearing natural and at ease for the only time. Someone close to Apollo tells me that when Lois arrived after the debacle with Marianne, they all thought she was an airhead, but they soon changed their minds. She scolds him playfully:
“He can go to the Moon, but he can’t make a cup of coffee …”
Which, on the face of it, would make a fantastic epitaph one day.
The ex-astronaut sits down and leans forward, cradling his coffee. We chat for a few minutes about this place, their old one in Laguna Beach, the horsey community in the San Fernando Valley where he tried so hard to piece together his life with Joan after retiring from the Air Force.
“… and my daughter had a horse, so I moved there and got that out of my system, sorta …”
Then he pulls up abruptly.
“Now, review if you would how this started and, ah, for some reason someone said, ‘He wants to talk about F-86s’ – is that right? That isn’t really what this says.” He fingers the printout of an e-mail I sent to give him an idea of what I wanted to talk about. “But that’s fine.”
He has a deep voice and enunciates his words with extraordinary care, though the order in which they appear can be less decisive. His syntax can be disorientating when you’re with him and takes a while to tune in to, but once on the page you see that he speaks a private creole of tiny sentences with no predicate. They capture the essence of a thought and are often very direct in themselves, yet circle like moons around something that Buzz can’t quite bring himself to say, like the speech of a small child, or haiku. There is also the impression that, even when idly discussing the weather, a portion of his psyche still believes itself to be apprising Mission Control of its current status – then, just when you might feel that he’s sounding self-important, he’ll surprise you with an example of startling self-awareness or a self-deflating confession. At the height of her preflight fear, Joan Aldrin confided to her diary that “He is such a curious mixture of magnificent confidence bordering on conceit and humility, this man I married,” and it doesn’t take long to see what she meant. Sometimes when he speaks, you feel that what you’re actually hearing is the grunts and groans of two wrestling teams doing battle inside his skull.