Moondust (14 page)

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.

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:

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.