The Astronaut Wives Club Part 22

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 b.a.l.l.s studded with sequins. A minuscule white s.p.a.cecraft 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

Joan 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 Na.s.sau 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 peac.o.c.ky. 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 partic.i.p.ate. That made Joan very pleased, especially since she was not used to seeing such strong pa.s.sions 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 s.p.a.ceflight than she had three years before, when Buzz manned Gemini 12. She'd a.s.sumed that after his s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 a.s.signed 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 inst.i.tution, 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 ch.o.r.es 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!

Her plans for cleaning the house during the flight were never realized. She couldn't even bear to sit on her new armchair. Instead, she sat cross-legged on the floor, curling into a ball, and gleefully kicked her legs before her television set after a risky maneuver had been accomplished.

It took the crew three days to fly to the Moon, which meant a lot of time to endure for the wives. To avoid the press, they had to lie down in the backseats of neighbors' cars under blankets while being driven to the grocery store or the mall to go shopping. When one of them braved the beauty parlor undisguised, a female reporter was on her tail. With thick green s.h.a.g carpet, gilt mirrors, and chandeliers, Parisienne Coiffures at the local shopping center was owned by a very "au courant" bearded French hairdresser who wore colorful suits without lapels. He had chosen Houston because he wanted to be where the action and glamour were. So had the two mod English girls who worked for him. The Astrowife sat under a hair dryer listening to a handheld radio account of the flight as the reporter watched her every movement from a nearby chair with her notepad on her lap. "Comb me out slowly," the reporter told her hairdresser.

Annie Glenn had sent the Apollo 11 wives each a yellow orchid, potted in a champagne gla.s.s with a note: May G.o.d watch over you and your family. Fondly... For the next few days, the living rooms of Togethersville were as tense as NASA's control room. One day, Joan sat in a blue polka-dot swimsuit chain-smoking in front of the television, while out in her backyard the Apollo 11 wives hosted a pool party. "It's like a dramatic television show, but it seems unreal. There are just no words. Don't you agree?" Joan said to one of her visitors. It was still very much uncertain whether Neil and Buzz would be able to land successfully on the Moon. They wouldn't know for sure until they touched down, and then they wouldn't know if they'd be stranded there until they lifted back off into lunar orbit.

On Sunday, July 20, the lunar landing module Eagle, a silver spider with suction cups for feet, detached from the main s.p.a.cecraft, Columbia, which was being flown by Mike Collins. He would orbit the Moon alone while Neil and Buzz descended through the frozen silence of s.p.a.ce. Eagle floated slowly over Mount Marilyn and across the Sea of Tranquility, kicking up a cloud of dust.

"Okay, engine stop," Buzz called out over the squawk box.

It was 3:18 p.m. when Neil Armstrong said, "Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed."

Joan experienced an ocean of feelings surge inside her. Her very own Buzz had just landed on the Moon! The entire world would remember just where they were at this very moment for the rest of their lives. Beside her sat Dee O'Hara, the astronauts' personal nurse, who knew "the boys," as Life said, "better than any woman except their wives."

"It was probably the only time I've experienced a surreal moment," said Nurse Dee, awestruck. "I don't know how quite to describe it, but it was truly unreal. I saw the TV flickering and the LM was there, and we were told it was the Moon, and the LM was on the surface of the Moon. Of course, we were so relieved that they had landed. But it just simply wasn't real. Intellectually you know it is, and, of course, Joan, as was everyone, was terribly relieved that they had landed. I remember sitting there. I kept shaking my head. I thought, this can't be real, it just can't be. Here we are, on another planet. It was goose b.u.mps all around."

Joan's movements were tentative as she rose from the sofa and then fell to the floor. Of course the Life photographer caught the odd moment-Joan in baby blue polyester pants and a white-and-red polka-dot blouse lying still on the tile floor.

They got a much more emotionally readable photo when Joan, who had stood up and leaned against her wood-paneled wall, dramatically fell into the arms of Buzz's eccentric uncle, the serendipitously named Bob Moon. As everyone laughed and cried and clapped, Joan, who was surrounded by friends, pushed herself out of Uncle Bob's arms and disappeared into Buzz's midnight-blue study. Her mind simply couldn't absorb it. Joan was so overwhelmed with pure relief that they had landed that she swooned and actually blacked out for a few moments.

When she came to, she was lying on the floor and saw a matchbook beside her, and the reality that Buzz was on the Moon hit her again. She had to pick up that matchbook, to grab on to something tangible, but she couldn't get her brain to coordinate with her limbs.

It took her a while to compose herself, but compose herself she did. "See, all smiles," Joan would say in a cheerful voice. "No more tears."

The Conrads' was definitely the most "happening" house in Togethersville, which to Norman Mailer was textbook Squaresville. The macho writer thought that Jane was "sensationally attractive." He'd been commissioned by Life to write about the Moon landing, and Jane and Pete kindly invited him over for a backyard barbecue. Jane's friends were excited to see "the monster," as Jane jokingly called him, in person, wondering what kind of man would stab his wife with a penknife, as Norman notoriously had done in a drunken rage. Leading Norman under the crepe myrtles, two of Jane's braver, hipper friends danced around him and shook the tree, decorating the writer in bright pink blossoms, soothing the savage beast and showing him a really good time. He'd completely forgotten about his girlfriend from New York City, decked out in black high heels and fishnet stockings, very exotic for the s.p.a.ce burbs. The astronauts tried to toss her into the pool, but Pete rescued her.

Norman made a sport of reporting on the Apollo 11 wives, and for the duration of his a.s.signment he referred to himself as "Aquarius." As if imagining himself on a jungle safari, he spotted, through the suburban vegetation of El Lago, something totally unexpected: a Zen manor, s.p.a.cious, modern, and j.a.panese-inspired, featuring a heavy green statue of the Buddha in the living room, as well as a pool table. This was the home of Neil Armstrong. Neil had meticulously placed his rocks in the ivy-covered garden, creating the feel of a true Zen garden.

The neighbors thought Neil a bit taciturn, a bit mysterious. Daresay, cosmic? Neil was not a big breakfast eater-or a big exercise man. As he once told a friend, "I believe that every human has a finite number of heartbeats. I don't intend to waste any of mine running around doing exercises." The Life photographer Ralph Morse had once snapped the elusive fellow in a chef's hat. It was said he liked to make pizza and light the occasional cigar in celebration. The NASA public relations man was positioning the hot pink pedestal he'd have to haul from lawn to lawn for each of the Apollo 11 wives' press conferences. Aquarius would follow. The reporters fired their questions.

"Will you let the children stay up and watch the moonwalk tonight?" one of the journalists asked.

"Is this the greatest moment of your life?" asked another.

Mailer groaned. He found these questions canned.

"Are you pleased with the Sea of Tranquility as a place to land? What are you having for dinner tonight? s.p.a.ce food?"

Mailer moved over to Na.s.sau Bay to meet Pat Collins, who posed outside her house in a white dress. She'd just gotten her hair done and wore it in a high black beehive. Pat was an Irish Catholic girl from Boston. She had met her Mike in France when they were both stationed at an Air Force base in Chambley after World War II. As the recreational director, Pat had hosted events for the enlisted men during their off-duty tours: Ping-Pong and bridge tournaments, theater acting, historical tours of the local area and surrounding countries, the favorite Bingo Night. Because of her background as a social worker, she also did a fair amount of counseling. She was what the French called gamine, Virginia Slims skinny. Aquarius found her "conversationally glittery."