by Andrew Smith
All this undoubtedly had something to do with the mythological aura that surrounded Apollo 11 even before it took off. Chris Kraft admits that he felt his legs shake the first time he met the crew in a corridor following the announcement that they were “it.” Their launch was attended by roughly 20,000 “VIPs,” 1 million members of the public and 3,500 accredited press men and women. Up to 1 billion were claimed to have followed it on TV, at the end of a countdown that had lasted five days. Some say that one in seven of the world’s population would see the first step when it came and the crew felt the tension, too. Mike Collins remarked privately as he made his way to the near-deserted pad on that hot, close day: “There are one million visitors here to watch the launch, but I feel closer to the moon than to them …” His wife, Pat, expressed her fear through a poem, which asked: “Can you love me, and still choose whispers that I cannot hear?”
According to everyone I’ve spoken to who was there, most people were crying at liftoff. At a press conference afterwards, Wernher von Braun called it humanity’s biggest moment “since life first crawled out of the slime.” As they approached the Moon, a magnificent and intimidating sight, even Armstrong sounded excited, and once they’d landed, no one knew precisely where they were – although it was known that somewhere nearby, the Soviet Luna 15 probe, sent in a last-ditch attempt to grab a first clawful of lunar soil and make Apollo look silly, was assaying some wild moves in a prelude to crashing. The whole thing had an air of hallucination about it, so perhaps it’s unsurprising that you now hear stories of Armstrong never having walked, or gone at all; of Islamic Web sites claiming that he secretly converted to the faith after “hearing the adhan [call to prayer] on the Moon”; of his tribute to Mrs. Gorsky. A passage I particularly love from John Updike’s Rabbit Redux, which is set in 1969, has Rabbit, marriage failing, gut spilling, life a smudge of failed expectation, meeting his father in a bar after another day’s mindless work. It goes:
Pop stands whittled by the great American glare, squinting in the manna of blessings that come down from government, shuffling from side to side in nervous happiness that his day’s work is done, that a beer is inside him, that Armstrong is above him, that the U.S. is the crown and stupefaction of history. Like a piece of grit in the launching pad, he has done his part.
Bill, the host of my table, pulls onto the grit of the Sands car park in a big black SUV. With his sandy hair and toothy smile, he looks a little like Ron Howard’s dentist cousin – and might be, for all I know – but that’s not the first thing to strike me about him: what I notice first is that he’s wearing a neat polo shirt and beige jeans. This is significant because an apparently reliable source at an LA space auction house told me that the Reunion Dinner called for “business attire,” meaning that I’ve been standing in the still-hot late-day Nevada sun, trying not to sweat in my suit, unnecessarily, AGAIN, and am surely now doomed to reprise my role as the uptight, overformal Brit for the rest of the evening. I consider drawing an “Actually, I’m (half) American” badge, but settle instead for a resolution to launch my gin and tonic at the first person who tells me that I remind them of Hugh Grant. Waiting in Bill’s car are his girlfriend and her brother, and Bill’s teenage son, who probably thinks he’s humiliatingly overdressed because he hasn’t been allowed to wear his Puddle of Mudd T-shirt. It’s not fair.
Bill’s your card-carrying Really Nice Guy, mild in manner and sharper than he lets on at first, and he’s really excited. Thirty miles south in Carson City, he has a wall full of autographed astronaut photos and memorabilia, and he invites me down to see it tomorrow, explaining that this is a really big deal for him, because you don’t often get the chance to see Apollo astronauts, and you never get within snapping distance of Neil Armstrong. He adds that Armstrong has a reputation for not showing up, so we shouldn’t count our chickens, and we gossip space on the single block drive to the Golden Legacy, and park next to a poster advertising next week’s appearance by the Doobie Brothers. Inside, we pick our way through the thousands crowding the tables and slots and finally find the escalator to the exclusive predinner cocktail reception.
Human static fills the air. Flashbulbs flash. The room is the size of a basketball court, with a raised podium along one side and a bar and buffet running the length of either end, tended by men in white jackets and bow ties. In between are tables, but hardly anyone is sitting at them. Most guests either stand scanning the room or spin in little constellations across the floor, constantly moving, dissolving and reforming somewhere else. It takes me a while to notice that, out of perhaps two hundred people, a few wear matching green shirts, and that the constellations revolve around them. Then I see the green-topped figure of Charlie Duke, tall for a pilot and rocket-spined, surrounded by people with cameras exploding light, tilting his head to hear questions and comments and smiling happily, easily, handsomely with drink in hand – a different man from the sombre one I met in London after the loss of Pete Conrad. A short distance away, Dick Gordon yuks and winks through his milk-bottle glasses; Roy Orbison leprechaun. And Buzz is there, tanned and serious, with Lois on his arm and a crowd of men hanging on every word. I recognize Gene Cernan, too, who’s turned himself into a one-man space nostalgia industry and is with a very attractive, much younger woman. If you had to capture his mien in a single word, there’s only one that would do. Erect. Gene Cernan is erect.
There are others I don’t immediately recognize – not Moonwalkers – and some who flew Skylab rather than Apollo. But no greensleeved Neil Armstrong. The room is full now. So we hit the bar.
And that’s where I am, waiting my turn, when I hear a voice rear up behind me, a woman’s voice, gushing like a burst water main.
“Hey! Are you Neil?”
I turn and see a large woman in shiny purple-and-black cocktail dress, just a few feet away, facing a bespectacled man in a blue pinstripe suit and discreetly patterned tie. Business attire. It’s strange what time does to a face, discarding some features and cultivating others, until you end up with a kind of benign caricature of a younger self, a soft reopening of channels to the infant. Again the surprise: I wouldn’t recognize him in a crowd.
He’s tallish, perhaps five-ten, and thicker than he was thirty years ago, but not so very much. He’ll prove to be the only astronaut here tonight not wearing a green shirt and I wonder what inspired his decision. He fixes the woman with a steady gaze and speaks quietly but firmly. Is he Neil?
“Yes.”
Another shower of words.
“Great! Then wait right there – I gotta go get something for you to sign …”
The steady gaze.
“No, I don’t …”
“Oh sure you do!” comes the reply, and she shifts her weight to move.
Neil doesn’t say anything. He just tightens his lips and shakes his head, wearing an expression of such utter expressionlessness that it becomes extraordinarily expressive – as elegant and unequivocal a means of saying “fuck off” as I’ve ever seen. Unfortunately, I don’t catch the return response, because another woman is talking to me now, asking with some urgency whether she can borrow a pen. She casts an eye back at the astronaut and I tell her that I don’t think he signs. “Oh, if you shove something close enough in front of his face, he’ll sign,” she replies confidently. I give her a pen, interested now in seeing what happens to it, but by the time our attention has returned to Armstrong, he’s slipping away, followed by a trail of jostling people. As he moves, I can see others converging on him from the side, creeping through the channels between tables with the fixed gaze of cobras on their prey. Periodically, someone manages to place themselves directly in his path and he has to stop. He bows his head as they shout something in his ear – “So, Neil, what was it really like on the Moon?” – then he nods and squeezes a little smile, shakes off the crowd, trudges on, but finds another one clinging to him like ants to a mantis.
I say hello to Dick, and find Lois and Buzz sitting at a table in front of plates f
ull of untouched canapés. I tell Lois – truthfully – that she’s looking glamorous and try to say hi to Buzz, but he seems to be in some sort of trance. He’s clutching a small piece of paper and holding a pen to it, but his hand appears frozen. He can barely utter a greeting and I’m not sure whether the glazed look in his eye indicates concentration or fear, because he knows – I don’t – that he’s going to be called up to the stage later. In contrast, Charlie is relaxed and welcoming. We chat for a while and arrange to meet again in October, after which I go looking for Bill, and am enjoying a moment’s peace on my own at the bar by the entrance when I see the First Man, Armstrong, coming toward me. Involuntarily, I start. Our eyes meet and I fancy that I can see some sort of assessment going on – “How likely is this person to shout some demand in my face, or tell me at length where he was on July 20, 1969, while I was a quarter million miles away in the sky?” Then he cuts right and slides between two tables and, quickening his pace, saunters through the exit, leaving a contrail of people holding cameras and autograph books to gaze after him. He’s gone. A few beats pass and the fans melt back into the room. In my imagination, Armstrong is whistling like Huckleberry Finn, ready to break into a run the moment he gets round the corner.
And so it goes that ten minutes later the astronauts are being summoned to the front to receive yet another gratuitous award. Each member of the corps is called individually, in reverse alphabetical order, rising to a peal of applause. Second to last, the name “Neil Armstrong” soars through the whiskey-sour yonder, followed by a brief salvo of clapping, then … nothing. He appears not to be with us. The MC coughs, throws a glance to the wings to see if anyone knows what the hell’s going on, then recovers quickly, with a resounding “Buzz Aldrin!” at which cue Buzz obediently ascends. Upstaged, even here. As it happens, someone I later meet in Houston is passing through the upstairs casino to use his mobile phone at this precise moment and finds the First Man on the Moon perched on a stool in front of a one-armed bandit, just sitting, silently on his own, staring at the cherries while the casinogoers hustle and bustle around him with no notion at all of whom they’re bustling past.
Dinner is served in a larger hall on the other side of the building. On the way, my party chatters about what we’ve seen so far. Bill is like an eight-year-old again. His son is puzzled and politely bored: he tells me about skateboarding and the punk metal music he likes and I tell him about a time I found myself in the back of a stretch limousine (long story) on the night that a Bon Jovi concert was taking place in a provincial British city. Unaccustomed to seeing limos on their streets, citizens of the town assumed our car to contain Jon Bon Jovi himself. So what did they do? Some just waved or screamed, but many others strode over and pressed their faces hideously to the smoked glass, or tried to open the door, or shouted abuse, or dropped their trousers and waggled their arse, in ways which shocked and baffled me. Neither was this any kind of aesthetic protest – which I could have understood and perhaps even applauded – because many of them were on their way to the show. And I thought: if this is how humanity presents itself to a celebrity, no wonder celebrities are inclined to go a bit odd.
We talk about why this is and I think it’s something to do with ownership. Old-fashioned fame was acquired, but celebrity is bestowed: it only exists in relationship with the audience-jury we supply and comprise. Thus, we’re the arbiters. They owe us. We voted them in and we can vote them out, more immediately and effectively, in fact, than the politicians who themselves look and behave more like celebrities every day (perhaps in an effort to revive our waning interest in their show). Of course, Neil Armstrong is not a celebrity in the strict sense; because he did something to earn his status, his fame has a hinterland, but the boundaries between the two conditions have become so confused that we no longer recognize this distinction. So you’d better sign the autograph, sucker. You’re lucky I even ask. A widely reported study in the U.K. found that people who earn more than £35,000 a year feel more deprived than those who earn less, because they feel licensed to compare their lives to the more fabulous existence of their democratically appointed stars, and they wonder when their turn’s coming. Is it possible that our adulation of the famous is no more than a Trojan horse for our own disappointment and anger? Is this what Armstrong runs from?
We’ve arrived. Only purchasers of more expensive tables were admitted to the reception, so the dinner hall is larger, with a raised stage. There are more drinks beforehand, then a meal whose every mouthful is forgotten before it’s swallowed, save for a space-shuttle cake at the end (we don’t know it yet, but by this time next year celebratory space-shuttle cakes will be a rare thing indeed). Then the bearlike race president, Mike Houghton, marches to the lectern and calls the astronauts one by one to the stage again, in forward alphabetical order this time. There’s wild applause. Armstrong shows up now and is whooped. Charlie beams and the other spacemen all hug Dick. They sit behind a long table and wait for Houghton to initiate the proceedings, which he does with a defensive post-9/11 appeal to patriotism (“in recent years, it’s become unfashionable to call yourself a patriot of this great nation”) followed by an invitation to stand and pledge allegiance to the flag like schoolkids.
Those opening words:
“I pledge allegiance to the flag/of the United States of America …”
Jesus. The room disappears and I’m wheeling back into myself, because the last time I did this I was in sixth grade and my anti-establishment teacher was smirking because the pledge was about to be banned for its reference to God. Then a silver-haired male choir arrives to barrel “The Star Spangled Banner” and I’m surprised to find a little shiver running up my spine, for this awkward song that tells such a romantic story, of a time when America was the underdog and inspiration to dreaming republicans everywhere – real republicans; radicals and idealists – even if it took two centuries for reality to even pretend to the dream, and in the meantime gave us Reno. They follow up with “Anchors Aweigh,” at which the Navy men in the hall shoot to attention stiffly – Gene Cernan, I note, being the quickest and stiffest. The same happens with “Off We Go (into the Wild Blue Yonder)”; then Dick Gordon comes to the microphone and asks us to remember those who lost their lives in the push to space, without mentioning poor, heroic Komarov or any of the Soviets, to be followed by “The Apollo Story,” a glib presentation by the former TV anchorman Hugh Downs, in which we are told that “Kennedy was looking for a way to lift U.S. spirits as the U.S. wavered in the Cold War,” without so much as hinting that he was also looking for a way to save his own political hide. In this version, the official version, Apollo was a victory march, shorn of all doubt and ambiguity and dull as a government requisition form. I wonder why they like it so much?
The only thing to raise the temperature is a question-and-answer session with the astronauts, for which audience members have been invited to write questions on a piece of paper and hand them in so that the interesting ones may be identified and discarded. Even so, there are some revealing moments, as when Armstrong is asked, “How were you chosen to be the First Man on the Moon?” at which he places an arm around his former partner’s shoulder and smiles, “Actually, it was the pair of us.” It’s a warm gesture, which Armstrong might have been waiting years to make, but Aldrin doesn’t respond in any way, doesn’t turn to look at him, squeeze his shoulder, shake his hand or smile … he just continues to lean forward on his elbows and stare stonily ahead. Next, someone asks Cernan, “When are we going to get the next generation to Mars?” and he begins, apropos of nothing, “Well, I somewhat differ from Buzz on this …” going on to insist that we should go back to the Moon first. Two contributions leave an impression: first, Rusty Schweickart’s modest admission of “how lucky I was, because I didn’t deserve it and none of us up here deserves to have gone where we went – we lucked out, were in the right place at the right time, with the right set of taxpayers”; and second, Bill Anders’s interruption of Hugh Downs as he waxes about th
e pioneer spirit and idealism of the enterprise, to blurt, “Look, Apollo happened because the farmers in Iowa didn’t like them dirty Commies.” He laughs. I laugh. Otherwise you could hear a pin drop. At this stage, I don’t know much about Anders, except that he circumnavigated the Moon for the first time with Apollo 8 and took the spectacularly beautiful Earthrise photo, which enchanted everyone who saw it and became the emblem of the first “Earth Day” in 1970, then never flew again. I make a mental note to try to catch up with him later, because he sounds intriguing.
Outside in a smaller chamber, where guests inspect and make written bids in a charity memorabilia auction, it doesn’t take long for me to find what I’m looking for. Neil Armstrong stands, surrounded like Custer at Little Big Horn, patiently explaining some aspect of his thirty-three-year-old adventure for the four hundredth time this evening to a forty-something who looks as though he’s about to combust with joy. Finished, the astronaut turns, and begins to move in my direction. I want to ask whether we might speak privately some time. There are so many questions I’ve never heard him answer. So I place myself in his path, as I’ve watched others do all night and he stops, along with the gaggle of followers. He glances at my hands, probably noticing that I don’t carry a camera or autograph book, and I take advantage of the pause to introduce myself. Suddenly, I feel us being surrounded by a crowd of people, heads bowed to hear what’s being said, as I explain that I’m writing a book and wonder whether he might be available for a talk sometime. I tell him that I know he gets many requests for interviews and he looks me straight in the eye and smiles in a manner that strikes me as fatherly, nodding his head slowly and smirking “many, many, many,” in such a way that I can’t help but smile, too. Turnill saw the arrogant hero, Mailer the mystic technocrat, but I’m seeing Atticus from To Kill a Mockingbird. There’s a warmth in his voice that I wasn’t expecting.