by Andrew Smith
The voice is very hushed, almost whispering now.
“Let me see. Ahm. He died in ’74 and I’m seventy-two. And I’ve got a son, now, who’s forty-three. And I relate very closely to him and I try and relate to the older son, too. Ahm. And I get a lotta help, back and forth. And that didn’t exist with my father. Regrettably, you know, it just … really wasn’t there.”
I also had a father who projected some of his unfulfilled or unfulfillable ambitions onto me, I say, and although I loved him and still miss him, I was shocked to find that, when he died, there was a little corner of me that felt relief. The burden of expectation got lighter. I still feel shame when I think about this. He drops his eyes to the table in front of him, then fiddles with his hands.
“Well, I … I had to come to that a lot … earlier.” He emits a rueful snort. “Like, in high school on the football team. That was not somethin’ that my father got involved in particularly. And at West Point and MIT …”
There is another very long silence. For a moment, he really appears to be teetering on the brink of tears.
“There are a lot of conceptions that come out of Return to Earth, that my father was a very influential person and that when he said something, that I immediately did that. And I’ve been trying to counteract that.”
Men and their fathers: the touchstone so easily becomes an instrument of torture. There follows a discussion of Edwin Aldrin Senior’s wish for his boy to go into the Navy rather than the Air Force, in which he seems to admit that his father was right. The Air Force was working toward its own rocket-powered space planes in the late 1950s and wanted to keep its best pilots, while the Navy read the runes right and pushed its people into NASA. “Right or wrong,” he concludes, “the Navy had an organization that wanted to explore, take advantage of whatever came along, in a very possessive way.” The Air Force also retained a latent suspicion of this new form of flying that wasn’t real, stick-and-rudder flying. Aldrin says nothing to suggest that they were wrong.
“Gemini and Apollo were computerized and preplanned, so the era of the pilot in command, having the creativity to decide what he wants to do – that’s gone. Only in an emergency is it apparent. And in an emergency, like Apollo 13, they had no idea what went wrong. It was like, ‘We got a problem, all the lights are comin’ on!’ And it was up to the ground to figure out what the problem was! And we still have former astronauts saying that the ultimate decision is with the guy in command of the spacecraft. Well, that’s not true at all. It’s true when it comes to saying ‘bail out’ or a few other decisions. So I’m a fighter pilot and I want to be in control. I’m perfectly willing to see the wave of the future and if anything, I might overcompensate, just to make sure that I’m not following a stereotyped path. I want to really look at the unusual. I mean, that’s why I wrote Encounter with Tiber, to stimulate the unusual thinking.”
He’s taken all my line and headed for the deep water again. I seem to recall him saying that he’d rather not have been on the first mission to land. Does he still feel like that?
“No. And I didn’t really feel that way at the time. It was an observing of an option. And it really wasn’t available.” He laughs. “But it was the postflight pressure that prompted me to say, ‘This is gonna lead toward, ahm, challenges that I don’t relish.’ And they were not ones of performing the mission. They were ones of elaborating and being clever and whatever else.”
From the Space Age to the Media Age and a foretaste of modern celebrity culture. In my experience, almost everyone has trouble living in the eye of that one for any length of time, however much they might think they want it. And his mission was more than just a media event: the idea of what they were doing had an almost primal fascination and I’m already starting to think of Apollo as a crossing place, a place where two worlds meet briefly, then part forever. Hardly surprising if some of those involved fell through the cracks.
Just then, Lois bustles in, bearing a copy of the Sibrelgate story from this morning’s Los Angeles Times. She shows it to Buzzy.
“Oh, that’s pretty good,” he says.
“It is pretty good,” Lois replies, then turns to me with a smirk. “Did you hear about everything?”
I tell her about the hotel news and she laughs at her daughter’s chagrin over having been photographed crossing the road with Buzz in her frumpiest attire. “She has so many cute outfits, but she didn’t know she was going to be filmed!” She shakes her head. Buzz has been poring over the picture in the paper.
“I suspect that that’s … I think that’s after impact,” he pronounces finally. “ ’Cos it’s not going in the right direction.”
By “it” he means his fist. Lois and I erupt into laughter at Aldrin’s need to analyse the trajectory of his punch and in the end he joins in, chuckling, “Well, who knows? Haha.” Underneath it all, they’re worried, though, seeming particularly preoccupied with the response of the media. Aldrin appears to feel about the media the way a crab must feel about seagulls, a mixture of deep resentment and exaggerated respect, bound in resignation. This time he was set up by a former friend, a wealthy Japanese socialite who now has her own TV show in Tokyo, specializing in the bizarre. She didn’t tell him that this particular programme was about the lunar-conspiracy theory. I ask him if he really hit Sibrel.
“Oh, yeah.” He smiles.
A year or so into the future, a similar trap will be set by the comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, masquerading as the hapless hip-hop media star Ali G. Admittedly, “Ali” opens with a good one (“I know this is a sensitive question, but what was it like not being the First Man on the Moon – was you ever jealous of Louis Armstrong?”), yet on this occasion Aldrin comes off better than Cohen, I think, who will surely be disappointed to meet with nothing but polite good humour, even when he asks: “Do you fink Man will ever walk on the Sun?” and calls him Buzz Lightyear. Right now, however, Buzz and Lois are afraid that Sibrel will sue in a bid to gain even more publicity for himself and his cause. In the end, he won’t, but Aldrin is no stranger to law courts. At one stage, I make an offhand remark about the honour of having a Disney character named after him (meaning that parents are forever introducing him to their otherwise uninterested kids as “the real Buzz Lightyear”). I’ve forgotten that he took Disney to court over this. He also sued Omega for advertising their watches with a photo of him wearing one they’d given him on the Moon (they presented one to all of the astronauts prior to their flights). He tried to get compensation, but ran up against some tough Swiss lawyers and failed.
“It gets pretty nasty after a while. And I’m trying to tell ’em, ‘It was my decision to take yer watch to the Moon. Neil decided not to for whatever reasons. It was my decision: where are you helping me with any of that?’”
Before long, I’ll get a chance to wear the watch Armstrong chose not to take. For now, though, Aldrin’s preoccupation with money is not so hard to empathize with. No one can look at an Apollo travel expenses voucher without assuming it to be a fantastic joke. His framed version reads:
PAYEE’S NAME: Col. Edwin E. Aldrin 00018
FROM: Houston, Texas
TO: Cape Kennedy, Fla.
Moon
Pacific Ocean
AMOUNT CLAIMED: $33.31
After the years of torpor, he probably feels as though he’s got some time to make up for. Still, empathy or not, the concern with cash is not always pretty. There follows a long complaint about the unfairness of his missing out on a promotion after his Apollo flight, then a long defence of his stance over the issue of who should leave the LM first – despite the fact that I haven’t mentioned it. He tells me that he asked the other LM pilots for counsel on “what my position oughta be.” I ask what the response was.
“They have written books saying that I asked them to defend my cause. And to take a very aggressive position.”
Who said that?
“Well, [Apollo 17 Commander, Gene] Cernan did, among a number of other things. He’s a very
competitive person. Very driving to put his ‘Last Man on the Moon’ as a very significant position.”
Last Man on the Moon is the title of Gene Cernan’s recently published memoirs. Clearly, there’s some bad blood here. Aldrin raises Cernan’s near disastrous Gemini 9 spacewalk, as a consequence of which NASA withdrew an experimental manoeuvring backpack from Gemini 12, with which Aldrin would have been able to steer himself through space as per the Bond film Moonraker. This is how he explains it.
“Because of that failure and others, as I came along, NASA cancelled the manoeuvring unit from Gemini 12. That hurt me, that they did that. Anyway, there are a lot of little issues like that, where you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. That kind of a situation. I’ve got a fighter squadron that I was in from ’56 to ’59 and we get together every year now. But do the astronauts get together? No. There’s still this …”
He’s groping for a word and I try to help out with “competitiveness?” but I’m wrong.
“Well, there’s this withdrawal – ‘That’s my life then, I’m doing different things now … I’m flying airplanes, I’m doin’ that stuff.’ And you know, everybody has a slightly different reason for justifying their – I’m gonna put a label on this – their disinterest in the present space programme.”
He says this in a milder tone of voice than you might imagine. “Disinterest?” I query.
“I think they have a bit of a disinterest. Are they going to conferences about determining the future of space? Are they keeping aware of this?”
I offer John Young, who commanded Apollo 16 and flew the first space shuttle mission, and who still works for NASA in Houston.
“But that’s his job. He’s drawing Navy retirement and civil service pay. And they keep adding up. So he’s a very astute guy and he contributes tremendously, and he’s taking advantage of everything that comes along.”
I ask who Aldrin was closest to during his time with Apollo? He takes a while to think about this.
“I had an identification, I think, that wasn’t really carried out, with Pete Conrad. It was an identification of, you know, let’s do things the right way. When Neil and I were on the backup crew for Apollo 8, we were very mutually supporting of creative ideas, of supporting ideas for that mission. And that was a real closeness. Earlier than that, there was a significant closeness between myself and [Gemini 12 crewmate] Jim Lovell. But on Apollo 11 there was clearly the test pilot, the commander and then the junior guy, you see.”
He smiles and produces a little laugh, hu-huh. He was the junior guy.
“Um. And the timing of where you were selected was dependent in a way on a peer rating system, which has its popularity aspects – who you get along with and so forth has an impact on who you think ought to get the choice assignments.”
He sighs as though he’s been holding his breath for a long time. As part of the selection process, Deke Slayton asked his astronauts to rate each other in confidence.
“So, there was an aspect of our third group of astronauts rating each other as to who’s going to fly first, second, third and fourth. And where was I? Very near the bottom of the list in the ratings of, uh, ahm. Otherwise I’d have been able to fly much earlier. But the way it was going to work out, I wasn’t even gonna fly in the Gemini programme.”
I’m wondering how Aldrin knew the results of Slayton’s polls: even those closest to the Astronaut Corps chief claim never to have been told more than that they were “surprising.” I wonder if he’s assuming his unpopularity? Clearly, Aldrin felt himself to be an outsider.
“Well, yeah, being an egghead from MIT. I mean, they didn’t give me any credit for shooting down airplanes in Korea. I’m not ashamed to say that I evaluated my career and did not want it to depend on my astuteness and my high skill as a pilot. So I selected a path different than a test pilot. Now you get into a business where everybody’s a test pilot except you and a couple of other guys, who were also sort of branded as eggheads …”
We wind our way back to the future of space exploration versus low-orbit fiddling and Buzz is enjoying himself again. It’s strange, though: even when he was settling scores with Cernan and cursing his place on the ziggurat, what one felt from him was not so much anger as the sulky incomprehension of a boy who can’t work out what he must do to join the gang. Yet, the longer our conversation goes on, the more I find a truly strange image forming in my mind, of myself sitting on the couch, slowly transmogrifying into the father to whom he still imagines a debt of justification. This is not a comfortable feeling. Either way, he loves this Mars stuff and hearing him talk of it is fun, as if the days of boldly going might return. He smiles and leans back into the sofa, causing his teensy shorts to ride up his legs and afford a more generous view of the Aldrin extreme upper thigh region than I’d thought to anticipate.
He mourns the eleventh-hour failure of an effort to get pop star Lance Bass of the boyband *NSYNC onto a Russian flight to the International Space Station, alleging that his Hollywood backers started trying to haggle and play cute with the Russians – something you don’t do. He thinks sending Bass up might have helped and, who knows, he might be right: the longer I look at it, the more I will come to think that Apollo was an emanation of popular culture before it was anything else. With due respect to the world’s boybands, however, I’m not sure that they’re the first place you turn for the “communicators” Buzz covets.
Suddenly aware that I’ve been here a very long time, I hurry to a question that’s been circling in my mind for a while: does Aldrin still suffer from depression? He speaks haltingly at first.
“No, I, ah, may get kind of fed up with things and decide to escape and ignore things, and then I may find it difficult getting back into the swing of things again. Ah. Ahm. I think there’s a history of being exhilarated with success and depressed with failure, that will never leave. Some people are kinda steady and they deal with both. Other people are more affected by those situations that come along. And to see the sunny side of crappy situations is a challenge!”
A deep laugh and Aldrin’s eyes crinkle with amusement. As I watch, thirty years seem to just fall away. Again I find myself unbalanced by his candor.
“And there’s a characteristic of depression, which people who’ve been there know, which is that when you’re in it, you’ll be so convinced that it’s never going to end that you cannot see the way out. If you can see the way out, you do that. But the characteristic of it is that you have no idea how you can possibly get out, or you refuse to take the steps that, intellectually, you know may help. You’re more comfortable just stewin’ around. That is not real threatening, but it’s inconvenient. ’Cos it means that I cannot tell someone six months ahead of time that I’m gonna be thrilled to go and entertain their gathering, or whatever it is. I may not.”
Does he think the lack of understanding of this condition affected his career in space, or his working relationships? He considers carefully before answering.
“Naw, I don’t really think that was much in evidence during the active stay with NASA.”
Because you had clear goals?
“No, I was focussed on space business more than lighthearted trivia. And a lot of people like extemporaneous, back-slapping trivia. The life of the party. Ahm …”
As I gather up my stuff and get ready to go, Aldrin asks if I can send him a tape copy of our conversation, saying, “I think that, some of the things I’ve touched on, I might have trouble getting all of those as well as we’ve been able to cover them here” – and naturally, I’m stunned to think that our encounter might represent the Moonwalker at his most clear and articulate. I’ve enjoyed talking to him enormously, but when I hit the street below, a wave of exhaustion will break over me such as I have rarely felt before, because, syntax aside, Buzz Aldrin has proven to be even more intense than Edgar Mitchell. I find myself wondering whether the others are going to be like this and whether the trip really did change and unsettle them, as Mitchell suggest
ed? Or whether this kind of intensity is what you needed to get there in the first place? I tell him that I’ll be happy to send him some tapes, then mumble something about his life journey having been more – the word slips out involuntarily – intense than most.
“Yeah,” he chuckles, “and I think there’s a need to balance that intensity with an easier association with levels of society that can help network actions mutually between people.”
Now I’m laughing. Buzz: what did you just say?
He cracks up, too. Because he knows. And in this moment, it’s impossible not to feel a real liking and admiration for him.
Soon afterwards, we’re almost at the door and I stop, feeling a little like Peter Falk in Columbo (but better dressed, obviously), with “just one more thing.” In the Aldrin family photos from the late Sixties, I couldn’t help feeling an affinity with his son Andrew, who was born a few years before me. I’d hoped that I might speak to him, compare childhood perspectives on the Space Age from the inside and outside.
Buzz talks fondly of the son he had to leave as a young teenager when the family fell apart. He tells me that Andrew has just taken a job with Boeing and is house-hunting in Houston this week, and that he’ll be happy to give me his phone number.
“He’s got a great future that I think is unfolding. He’s very well appreciated and liked by all the people he comes into contact with.”
This being a trait that Buzz has felt the lack of, I joke, drawing a weary smile in response.
“Well, I appreciate the fact that he is able to do that. I think my father had some of those tendencies of not exactly fitting smoothly in.”
And you picked them up?
“Yeah.”
We shake hands and he gives me a business card which delights me by reading simply, “Buzz Aldrin: Astronaut,” but before I can step out the door, Lois comes charging along the corridor from the back office, clutching a note she’s preparing to circulate to the couple’s friends about the Sibrel incident. She cackles as she hands it to me and I read it aloud. It says: