The Astronaut Wives Club Part 23

"Mrs. Collins," asked a reporter, "do you mind that your husband is not landing with the others?"

Mike was remaining in the mother ship Columbia while the other boys were on the Moon. Like her husband, Pat insisted that she didn't care. But Aquarius didn't believe her. How could she and Mike not care that he had traveled all the way to the Moon and couldn't even go down and take a stroll on its beachy surface? Mailer waited for Pat to crack, but it was not to be.

So he was off to Joan Aldrin's, whose glistening pool surrounded by a fence seemed to be an oasis of tranquility. What darker things lurked beneath the placid surface? Aquarius wondered. It started to rain, a summer thunderstorm beating down on the roofs of Na.s.sau Bay, and the reporters had to put on their red and yellow ponchos.

"Mrs. Aldrin," one of them asked, "what were you doing when they landed?"

"I was holding on to the wall," said Joan, emotionally exhausted. "I was praying."

Aquarius could almost smell that something was amiss here at the Aldrins'. A strange bird, this Joan, but what kind of beast was her Buzz? Mailer sensed, even from this brief glimpse, that Joan was trapped in a marriage full of raw agony. (With four marriages already under his belt, three to aspiring actresses, Aquarius knew of what he spoke.)

"Listen," Joan asked. "Aren't you all excited? They did it! They did it!"

But the crowd of wet reporters seemed bored and ready to go home. They'd grown jaded after a decade of covering the wives. After Joan returned inside, with no more wives to cover that day and the Moon landing that the country had been antic.i.p.ating for a decade now behind him, Aquarius suddenly regretted that he hadn't paid Joan, whose husband had just landed on the Moon, the attention she deserved.

At just before 10 p.m., on that same day, July 20, 1969, six and a half hours after they'd landed on the Moon, Neil Armstrong stepped off of Eagle's footpad onto the Moon.

"That's one small step for man," declared Neil, "one giant leap for mankind."

Only after Neil had planted his foot on the Moon, which reminded him of the American high desert, was Buzz allowed to join him. "It's like making an entrance onstage," said Joan. The second man on the Moon described his view as "magnificent desolation."

Joan threw kisses toward the TV screen, laughing, her whole body shuddering on the verge of tears as Buzz bounced across the lunar surface, doing what the wives named the Kangaroo Hop.

"How can you be serious about what you're doing when you're doing that?" asked Joan. "He's gotten more TV time in the last two days than I ever did in a year of trying!" Still, she couldn't shake how devastated her husband was that he had to be second. The glory would forever be Neil's, who would always be first.

After the astronauts completed a two-and-a-half-hour moonwalk and spending twenty-one hours on the Moon, the Eagle prepared to lift off to rendezvous with Mike in orbit. As Buzz got closer and closer to Earth, Joan felt sweeter than ever toward her big cosmic baby, coming home to Mama. "Bless him. Bless the baby! They're on their way back to Mother. That's a good boy. Just think, tonight we'll have that beautiful big burn and then-look out, world, here we come! I don't have any more tears. I think I've just cried for the past two weeks."

"I called three of, in my view," said President Nixon, "three of the greatest ladies and most courageous ladies in the whole world today-your wives."

The man who had once schooled Khrushchev on the virtues of America's greatest cold warriors-the true-blue housewives of the U.S. of A.-was now speaking in person to the Apollo 11 astronauts upon their safe return to Earth, and brought a message from their wives.

"I bring their love and their congratulations. And also, I've got to let you in on a little secret. I made a date with them."

The astronauts couldn't do much about that one, seeing as they were speaking to the president from behind gla.s.s, quarantined in the MQF, the Mobile Quarantine Facility, a tricked-out silver Airstream parked aboard the USS Hornet. Scientists thought there was a possibility, no matter how remote, that the astronauts might have picked up some alien Moon germs that could produce a lethal global epidemic. Flying off shelves in bookstores, Michael Crichton's bestselling novel The Andromeda Strain dramatized such a consequence of an extraterrestrial plague.

"I invited them to dinner on the thirteenth of August," continued Nixon, "right after you come out of quarantine. It will be a state dinner held in Los Angeles. The governors of all the fifty states will be there, the amba.s.sadors, others from around the world and in America. And all I want to know-will you come? We want to honor you then."

Neil Armstrong smiled. "We'll do anything you say, Mr. President."

"This is the greatest week in the history of the world since the Creation, because as a result of what happened, in this week, the world is bigger, infinitely, and also, as I'm going to find on this trip around the world...as a result of what you've done, the world's never been closer together before," said the beaming president. "Incidentally, the speeches that you have to make at this dinner can be very short. And if you want to say fantastic or beautiful, that's all right with us. Don't try to think of any new adjectives. They've all been said."

The headlines were thrilling:

MEN WALK ON MOON. ASTRONAUTS LAND ON PLAIN. COLLECT ROCKS, PLANT FLAG

A POWDERY SURFACE IS CLOSELY EXPLORED

ANCIENT DREAM FULFILLED

Twenty-one days later, the biomedically swabbed astronauts were deemed free of any Moon plague by the time they waltzed into the Apollo 11 Moon Ball, a grand, extravagant, star-studded affair. The guest list was a veritable who's who of the entire country, including practically every American official in the chain of succession as well as the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court and every member of the cabinet. And of course, there was NASA's own German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun; Charles Lindbergh; World War I flying ace Eddie Rickenbacker; Mrs. Robert G.o.ddard, the widow of the rocket pioneer; Howard Hughes; and Jackie and Aristotle Ona.s.sis. There was also "a delegation from the entertainment world": Fred Astaire, singing cowboy Gene Autry, and Joan Crawford. LBJ and Lady Bird had sent their regrets.

The astronaut couples were put up at the new nineteen-story, crescent-shaped Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles on the corner of the Avenue of the Stars and Constellation Boulevard, the perfect setting with its s.p.a.ce-age design and spectacular Celestial Fountain. Flown in by helicopter, the Nixons were staying in the Presidential Suite, which boasted a view all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Everything was Moon-themed. The band played "Fly Me to the Moon" and "Moon over Miami." The menu featured the finest foods from around the world, including kiwi fruits from New Zealand and Dungeness crab fingers from Seattle. Two new desserts had been created for the occasion: "Moon Rock" pet.i.t fours, and Claire de Lune, a delicately textured marzipan, meringue, and blackberry confection. Everything, like the Moon, was topped with an American flag.

All the astronauts were at the ball, from the Nineteen to the Fourteen to the New Nine to the original Mercury Seven. Eight astronauts had been lost along the way-Ted Freeman, Elliot See, Charlie Ba.s.sett, Gus Grissom, Ed White, Roger Chaffee, Ed Givens, and C. C. Williams-but with six months to spare, America had landed on the Moon, fulfilling Kennedy's goal to reach it before the end of the sixties. It was perhaps the greatest adventure America had ever undertaken, a Manhattan Project for peace.

Outside the hotel, three thousand demonstrators had a different view. After a decade of sit-ins and be-ins, the counterculture thought the occasion perfectly demonstrated the skewed values of the country. With all of the problems ravaging America, the poverty and the inequality rampant across the land, the soldiers dying by the thousands in Vietnam, we had to waste so much brainpower and money going to the Moon? And then celebrate it with a decadent "ball" sponsored by the military-industrialist complex? Raising their fists at the arriving limos and smoking pot in the open air, the protesters had somehow managed to drape a huge banner from the upper floors of an office building across the street from the hotel, summing up their point with two words: "f.u.c.k Mars."

Next up was the "Giant Step" world tour, which would extend over forty-five days and feature visits to multiple heads of state in twenty-three countries. Rechristened goodwill amba.s.sadors, the crewmen and wives of Apollo 11 were briefed by the State Department on the customs of the different countries they'd be visiting: when they should bow or curtsy, whom to address as "Your Majesty" or "Your Royal Highness." Joan learned that one should never turn her back on a king or a queen. She'd need to remember that.

"Three kings in two days! Do you believe it?" Joan asked her fellow travelers, reviewing their mimeographed itinerary.

Loaded onto Air Force One was her mountain of luggage, ten suitcases bearing tags identifying the specific climate for which each had been packed. Joan also brought along a special travel journal, plastic-protected in green-and-black houndstooth. "Beginning the grand tour," she wrote on September 29, "arrived Mexico City eleven a.m. local time. Wild motorcade through city. Lunch with President Diaz Ordaz. Didn't finish till five p.m. Press conference for wives at hotel. Awkward! Reception at Amba.s.sador McBride's. Saw Brandy. Supper with party here-Gina Lollobrigida. Tired."

"I thought Gina was interesting," said Buzz when they returned to their hotel room, a little spice finally peppering his flat manner. Since he'd returned from the Moon, Joan thought that his blue eyes were different, a little bluer and a little more animated. Nurse Dee observed that all of the boys came back from s.p.a.ce slightly changed: "They have something, a sort of wild look, I would say, as if they had fallen in love with a mystery up there, sort of as if they haven't gotten their feet back on the ground, as if they regret having come back to us...a rage at having to come back to Earth." Though Joan had been hoping Buzz would share more of his deep feelings about the experience of walking on the Moon with her, he kept telling her he was sick and tired of talking about the Moon. He'd already said what he had to say at the many press conferences that had followed their twenty-one-day quarantine. "It was a unique, almost mystical environment up there," he'd said, and it had smelled to Buzz like gunpowder or spent cap pistol caps.

"Gina is giving us a party in Rome," Buzz told Joan. "I accepted."

Joan didn't even try to cover up her irritation. "You did? Well, tell her I don't want to hear the gory details of her car accident again. And I don't want to see her scars in the ladies' room again."

"You got to see her what?"

"Her s-c-a-r-s."

On just the second day of the grand tour, the White House called Buzz back to the States from Bogota to attend an AFL-CIO convention in Atlantic City. Buzz was not a happy camper. Dr. Bill Carpentier, the Apollo 11 flight surgeon, who was along on the tour, asked him to step aside for a private chat to see if he was feeling okay.

"I don't think so, Bill. I think I'm overwhelmed."

"I think you all are."

The doctor prescribed some pills to help with the anxiety. Buzz unhappily went off for a few days in Atlantic City while Joan continued on to Buenos Aires. She retired to her hotel early one night and wrote in her diary, "Planned to go to a show, but p.o.o.ped out and had a bowl of soup in my room. Rain and fog."

The next morning, she found herself in Rio de Janeiro at the Copacabana Palace Hotel accepting three awards for Buzz. The NASA public affairs man congratulated her on her fine performance. At the hotel, alone again, Joan hummed a popular song, "Whaddaya do on a rainy night in Rio"-adding her own lyrics-"without a husband?"

Buzz was to rejoin the troops in four days in the Canary Islands. When Joan arrived at the Maspalomas Hotel after a long nighttime drive, she found Buzz sound asleep in their room. He woke up long enough to eat a sandwich with her, then went back to sleep. She felt as alone with him as she had without him.

In Paris, just before leaving for Amsterdam and Brussels, Joan awoke to find an official telex from the American emba.s.sy in the Netherlands in her room-"Queen Juliana insists, repeat, insists it is imperative for women to wear black for audience." Over breakfast, Joan muttered about Queen Juliana, that "mean old biddy." Queen Fabiola of Belgium hadn't made such a request! Joan didn't want to go to all the trouble of figuring out how to get the one black dress she'd stuck at the back of one of her garment bags, which were stowed on the plane. As it turned out, Queen Juliana was sweet and without airs, and actually favored pastels, leading Joan, conspicuously in pink, to conclude that Pat Collins had played a practical joke by making up and sending that telex.

In Amsterdam, cheers and showers of rose petals and open displays of affection met them. A woman put a bouquet of roses under Buzz's nose and asked the Moon man how he liked her city. Of course, a microphone was hidden in the bouquet, but at least the gal showed real initiative.

As Air Force One flew to Oslo a couple of days later, Joan was presented with "the Pat Nixon Medal-for displaying the qualities of quiet and determined restraint most evident in our First Lady in not upstaging her husband when the public obviously wanted to see her, not Buzz."

Buzz was really excited to go to Norway. He was proud of his Scandinavian descent. If any country might add him to the pantheon of the G.o.ds of Valhalla, it was Norway. The flat behavior of the Norwegians watching the motorcade put Buzz into a blue funk.

When a helicopter took all the Moon couples to the Norwegian defense minister's lodge high in the mountains, Buzz decided he'd had enough of these "fresh-air fiends" with their cool demeanor. Joan would have to tell their hosts that he was not going to be joining them for dinner. When she came back to their room later that night, Buzz was sitting in an armchair, still in a funk. What was his problem? Buzz hadn't even liked Paris!

She reached for the bottle of scotch, fixed them each a generous nightcap, and settled down to talk. Expression heavy as a boulder, Buzz became angrier and angrier as Joan tried to convince him that their lives would "eventually return to normal."

"Joan, I've been to the Moon, and I'm never going to be allowed to live the way I once lived. Neither are you and neither are our kids. Your belief isn't right, it's only a hope and it won't work. Let's try to make it as worthwhile as we can."