The Astronaut Wives Club: A True Story (26 page)

Why Frank hadn’t responded to their private joke? Susan only prayed that the engine would work and slow the spacecraft down so that it came into lunar orbit at the proper angle. She couldn’t bear the awful silence on the squawk box. Would they ricochet off the Moon’s gravity field and be lost forever in space, or crash into the Moon?

Finally, the squawk box came to life.

“Apollo 8, Houston. Over.”

“Go ahead, Houston,” crackled Frank. “This is Apollo 8. Burn complete.”

“Apollo 8, this is Houston. Roger…good to hear your voice.”

Susan closed her eyes in relief. For the next twenty hours, Frank would be orbiting ten times around the Moon, from late Christmas Eve into early Christmas morning. On Christmas they’d head home, but first they’d have to perform the most critical part of the mission, the one Susan dreaded the most—trans-Earth injection.

Dear God, she didn’t know if she could survive it. She kept vigil in her kitchen, ears alert to the squawk box, eyes glued to the television. The sun still hadn’t fully come over Houston Christmas Eve morning at 6:30 a.m. when the TV in the den broadcast the first lunar telecast, the video from Frank’s camera surveying the bleak, pockmarked lunar terrain.

Susan had greater things on her mind than to be fascinated with this glimpse of another world. The only thing that mattered was that Frank came home.

As the navigator, Jim Lovell identified landmarks from the Moon maps—the Sea of Tranquility, Dry Gulch, Apollo Ridge, Twin Peaks. Nearby was a lunar mountain range.

“I can see the initial point right now, Mount Marilyn,” Jim radioed to Mission Control. Astronaut Mike Collins, serving as Capcom, was puzzled. “Roger.”

That afternoon, Marilyn Lovell phoned her priest, Father Raish. It was between services. “I’d like to come over to the church,” she told him.

When Marilyn arrived, the church was empty save for Father Raish and the organist, who was playing the music for midnight mass. The church was lavishly decorated with poinsettias and holiday garlands, but she didn’t expect to see it alive with hundreds of candles like tiny dancing stars.

“You did all this for me?”

Father Raish knew she wouldn’t be able to attend regular midnight mass, since her husband would be performing some critical maneuvers then, but there was something godly about going around the Moon. He wanted Marilyn to have a special Christmas. She and Father Raish knelt down at the altar. As they prayed, tears welled in Marilyn’s eyes.

Driving home from church, her whole heart was up there with the Apollo 8 crew. As she was pulling into Timber Cove, she looked up at the sky, just as she and Jim had when they were teenagers back in Milwaukee and he’d point out the constellations to her and they’d neck. It had been cloudy all week, but suddenly the clouds parted. There was the Moon, the bright, beautiful half Moon.

“My God, my husband is going around the Moon at this moment,” Marilyn thought. “I’m blessed, I’m truly blessed.”

Susan sat down at her kitchen table. She took out a piece of paper and a pen and began writing Frank’s eulogy.
If they don’t get the Apollo 8 crew back safely, the press will really have a field day. Three dead astronauts circling the Moon,
she thought.
They’ll stage a big funeral in absentia, but I’ll be damned if they are going to tell me how to run it.
She didn’t know where to start, but then she had an epiphany:
What a magnificent place to die.
She wrote down her feelings that the world should feel uplifted. After all, Frank was watching over them, orbiting the Moon for eternity. Susan thought that was what Frank would want. No brown mud-earth grave for him at Arlington or West Point, but the smooth silver orb that lovers had stared at for centuries. Susan could look up whenever she needed a connection.

“Mom, what are you writing?” Fifteen-year-old Ed had come into the kitchen.

“Your father’s memorial service. He might not come back.”

“Just remember, Mom,” said Ed. “Dad gets to choose the way he goes—you and I don’t have that privilege.”

Ed took the pen out of her hand and Susan slid the paper with the eulogy from sight. Later she would hide it in a drawer.

That night at 9:30 p.m., it was time for the crew to make their special Christmas Eve television transmission. “We are now approaching lunar sunset,” said Frank, “and for all the people back on Earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message that we would like to share with you.”

“In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep,” said Bill, reading from the book of Genesis for a live television audience around the world, “And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the water. And God said, ‘Let there be light.’ And there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good. And God divided the light from the darkness.”

Jim picked up next. “And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day…”

“They must be in God’s hands,” Marilyn said to herself, as Moon shadows flickered on her TV.

“And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the water called the seas; and God saw that it was good,” Frank continued. “And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with a good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you—all of you on the good Earth.”

Susan cried as her husband concluded the broadcast. Marilyn took her kids for a walk around the neighborhood, past the pool shaped like the Mercury capsule and their friends’ homes lit up with reindeer and lights. Jim and the Apollo 8 crew were about to go over to the far side one last time.

Trans-Earth injection, or “TEI,” was next. Susan was still dreading it, and soon the rookie Bill’s wife, Valerie, would be arriving to sweat it out with her. Earlier in the week, the two women had decided they’d sit together for the midnight event.

Bill had actually named a lunar valley for his wife. He wanted the name, Valerie’s Valley, to stick. But it didn’t quite have the ring of Mount Marilyn.

For the
Life
photographer, Susan wore a gray-lilac sheath and her signature strand of pearls, which she intermittently chewed on. Somebody had stuck a red pin on her that said
SANTA
LIVES
!
, but Susan didn’t look as if she believed it. Valerie wore eggshell blue trimmed in squiggly white rickrack. Both women had sweaters around their shoulders, for comfort as much as anything else. Two white squawk boxes, one for each, were dead silent.

Over on the far side, Frank was supposed to be kicking off TEI. Susan closed her eyes and her jaw, and the muscles around her neck tightened. It was a 12:34 a.m. on Christmas morning. Time for her to hear something.

“Apollo 8, Houston,” crackled the Capcom. “Apollo 8, Houston, Apollo 8, Houston, Apollo 8, Houston.”

Ten seconds of silence. Twenty. Thirty. Forty. Fifty. Fifty-one. Fifty-two…

“Houston, Apollo 8,” crackled Jim. “Please be informed. There is a Santa Claus.”

“That’s affirmative. You are the best ones to know.”

At Mission Control, the men clapped their colleagues on the back and lit up cigars. The boys were finally on their way home.

The sun rose over Timber Cove and the Lovell kids ripped into their presents, delivered the night before by a jolly neighbor dressed up as Santa. Marilyn couldn’t wait for her gift—Jim’s return home in two days. The waiting was the hardest part, but Marilyn was certainly used to it.

The doorbell rang. It was a deliveryman from Neiman-Marcus. He’d pulled up in a Rolls-Royce and wore a chauffeur’s cap. He had a big box wrapped in blue-and-silver foil. Perched on top was a mobile of the Moon and Earth, two Styrofoam balls studded with sequins. A minuscule white spacecraft was going around the silver-sequined moon on a wire. Marilyn looked at the card.

To Marilyn
From the Man in the Moon

She tore into her gift. Silver stars sparkled in the light blue tissue paper inside.

“A mink jacket!” she exclaimed. Jim knew she had always wanted a mink—didn’t every woman?—but it was a total surprise. Marilyn thought maybe he figured that in case he didn’t make it back, she would at least have that fur.

Marilyn danced around the family room in her mink, loving the feel of the fur against her skin. A little exhausted from all the excitement and stress, she let herself fall in a heap on the sofa. Wasn’t it crazy? Here she was, lying on the sofa, wrapped in her mink, and Jim was a quarter of a million miles away.

15

The Giant Leap

J
oan Aldrin couldn’t begin to wrap her mind around the enormous significance of the Moon landing scheduled for July 20, 1969. It would be years, decades, centuries, perhaps, before mankind comprehended the impact of the step her Buzz was about to take. She was sure that Apollo 11 would be the capper of Buzz’s accomplishments, which were many. Most wives in the A.W.C. wished their husbands were postmen, but Joan had a better idea.

“If Buzz were a trash man and collected trash,” she told the
Life
reporter, “he would be the best trash collector in the United States.”

Once as they watched the garbagemen make their rounds early in the morning in Nassau Bay, Buzz commented that he thought they didn’t take enough pride in their work, listlessly slinging the bags up into the truck instead of giving it their all. Joan knew that Buzz gave everything his all. He would undertake his Apollo 11 flight with vim, vigor, and gusto, and though he’d be a hero to the rest of the world, she knew he’d return to Earth the same thoughtful, brilliant man he’d always been. “A curious mixture of magnificent confidence, bordering on conceit, and humility,” she’d told
Life
. He was not one to become puffed up and peacocky. She took great comfort in that.

A year before, immediately after Martin Luther King Jr.’s death, there had been a peace march in Houston organized by some of the churches for Palm Sunday 1968. Buzz told Joan that he felt obligated to participate. That made Joan very pleased, especially since she was not used to seeing such strong passions stirred in Buzz. That Sunday afternoon, he marched to city hall, and the next day his picture appeared on the front page of the
Houston Chronicle
. Joan was a little worried because she didn’t know how NASA would respond when they read the caption about an astronaut marching. Luckily the caption didn’t say
who
that astronaut was. She was amazed at the number of people who didn’t recognize the photo as being of Buzz.

On Monday morning at the astronauts’ weekly meeting, one of the guys mentioned, not exactly encouragingly, how he had heard some astronaut marched in “that peace parade yesterday.”

Buzz hadn’t said a word. His peers weren’t exactly civil rights activists. And for that matter, they hadn’t liked him very much to begin with. With his PhD from MIT, they thought Dr. Rendezvous was an overly intellectual square.
Let them think what they want
, Joan said to herself. Let Buzz be a square, so long as he’d still be square when he returned from the Moon.

Now, in the summer of 1969, Joan had a much more sanguine outlook on Buzz’s spaceflight than she had three years before, when Buzz manned Gemini 12. She’d assumed that after his space walk, he’d be much less cold than he usually was, that he’d share his feelings about what he’d experienced. She’d expected him to have a profound spiritual transformation in space, like Ed White’s ecstasy of the deep, so that back on Earth he’d become closer to her, more emotionally engaged. She told Dodie Hamblin of
Life
that she’d envisioned their sometimes tenuous and distant relationship becoming “so much more magical and meaningful and magnificent because he had done this wonderful thing.”

Unfortunately, after Buzz’s Gemini flight, their marriage was unchanged. Buzz was still gone most of the time; his moods were still heavy and impenetrable. He was as withdrawn as ever. “Maybe six months later I realized that our marriage was exactly what it had been before, that if we had an argument, we argued still over the same things, but we still shared the same ideals and principles,” said Joan.

In January 1969, while they were standing in a local Laundromat waiting to pick up their clothing, Buzz had told Joan that he’d been assigned to the first crew to land on the Moon. Joan tried to be thrilled but felt curiously numb. She wrote in her diary, “It was a day, the first of many, I’ll bet, of walking on eggs, of normalcy tinged with hysteria. I wish B were a carpenter, a truck driver, a scientist, anything but what he is. Now I understand how Susan Borman felt—wanting to run and hide. I want him to do what he wants but I don’t want him to.”

A few days later she wrote, “Had a long talk with Buzz, but still don’t understand what he was driving at. Who makes the first exit from the LM on lunar surface is still very much of an issue. And B was upset because he heard, via that terrible institution, the grapevine, that Deke’s opinion was that Neil should be the first for historic reasons if nothing else.”

Apollo 11’s commander, Neil Armstrong, was a civilian, and both NASA and President Nixon felt it was important for Apollo 11 not to be seen as a form of military action, of lunar conquest, especially with the Vietnam War still raging. When the crew—Neil, Buzz, and Mike Collins—designed their mission patch, they picked an eagle to represent the “LM,” the lunar module
Eagle
, and placed an olive branch in its sharp talons.

Joan prepared for the eight-day mission by focusing on all the housekeeping chores she’d been avoiding. “Wash the windows, paint the walls, anything to keep sane,” she told Dodie. She even ordered a new salmon-colored velveteen armchair from a local furniture company to reward herself for all the cleaning and redecorating she planned to do. It looked like a big mushroom.

In the weeks leading up to launch day, Joan broke out in pink blotches, but luckily she knew from her acting days how to apply a thick layer of pancake makeup so she’d be presentable for the press on her lawn. Dodie told Joan that she looked like Shirley MacLaine, which made Joan very happy. The actress in Joan viewed Apollo 11 as her big moment. She’d have a worldwide television audience!