Magnificent Desolation (17 page)

I replied that we did have the test pilot curriculum, but we also had a “zoom curriculum” to test NF-104 jets specially fitted with six-thousand-pound thrust rocket motors to familiarize students with some of the techniques required in space flight. The modified 104 jet could zoom well above 100,000 feet, providing the pilot with ninety
seconds of weightlessness. “We’re trying to run a top-notch test pilot school and astronaut training facility here, sir,” I offered.

General Brown cut me off short. “Colonel Aldrin, that’s the problem. Why do you have that course here? We aren’t training astronauts for NASA. Let NASA train their own astronauts; your job is to train test pilots for the Air Force. So change the name of this school immediately to the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School and get rid of those 104s and your ‘zoom’ curriculum.” The general’s attitude was almost as if he were saying, “Oh, you came from NASA and you think you’re hot stuff around here because you were an astronaut? Well, I don’t.”

The instructor pilots at the school stood silent, appalled and embarrassed for me. To castigate me like that in front of my young staff was extremely unwise and exhibited poor leadership on the part of the general, and it was futile to argue with him.

A short time later, General Bob White and I met together to discuss my future. The Air Force offered me a project to fill my remaining months, but it required me to move to Los Angeles. I made a counteroffer. I could legitimately retire on March 1 rather than wait until June, if the Air Force would allow my family to keep our home until the children could finish school. General White thought that could be worked out, and it was. My retirement benefited both of us: General White could get back to being the commanding general at Edwards, and I could get back to being a functioning human being.

On March 1, 1972, General Jimmy Doolittle came to Edwards for my brief but formal retirement ceremony. I appreciated Dad’s friend being there, and his continued support. General White was also there, as were Ted Twinting and all of my instructors and their students, who filled the large airplane hangar and stood in formation in one last show of support.

I have often wondered why the Air Force chose me to head up the test pilot school. They could easily have said, “Buzz, we don’t have anything for you right now, but let’s talk in six months to a year.”

My friend Alan Bean helped put it in perspective for me. An
eighteen-year veteran with the space program, Alan flew to the moon as lunar module pilot on the Apollo 12 mission. Years later, when asked about the decision to appoint me as commandant of the test pilot school, Alan concurred with the Air Force:

Alan’s comments are heartwarming, but at the time I probably wouldn’t have agreed with them. I was only forty-two years of age when I retired from the Air Force on March 1, 1972, even earlier than had been announced. I had been the commandant of the test pilot school a mere nine months, and it had been one of the most stressful periods of my life.

D
URING MY LAST
few weeks in the service, I had already begun thinking about life after the Air Force and toying with ideas of what to do. I had previously engaged in talks with the Bulova watch company, about a specially designed watch I had in mind. Bulova used some of my ideas, so I felt we might be able to do something together in the future. I dabbled with digital watches, convinced then that many of the communication devices of the future, including telephone, camera, calculator, and other functions, would operate off a person’s watch. This was in 1972, long before the Internet, cell phones, or text-messaging
services existed, but I felt certain that such technology would be the wave of the future.

Another, more immediate opportunity rolled my way. I did a rather tacky commercial for Dynamark Lawn Tractor’s rotary lawn mower. The tag line went something like, “Dynamark Lawn Tractor. Astronaut Buzz Aldrin drives it around—it’s out of this world.” I had gone from walking on the moon to selling lawn mowers.

The Volkswagen automobile company hired me to do a sixty-second television commercial extolling the virtues of the VW’s new digital computerized vehicle diagnostic system. The system was pretty amazing, and the work was relatively easy, just learning a few lines and delivering them with authority and credibility. We negotiated the deal while I was still at Edwards, and did the actual taping after my official retirement date of March 1.

For that, VW agreed to pay me a whopping $300,000. I thought,
Hey, retirement living might not be so bad, after all.

I also continued to think about the idea of writing a book about my experiences. When I mentioned this to the attorneys at Loeb & Loeb, who were helping me handle a number of my new business deals, they introduced me to Wayne Warga, a former
Life
magazine editor who was now living in Los Angeles and working as an entertainment writer for the
Los Angeles Times.
Wayne suggested that we might be wise to test the waters by writing an op-ed piece for the newspaper, and then see how the public responded. I didn’t want to write a book merely about going to the moon, but about the challenges I faced when I returned to Earth.

   8

B
EING HOSPITALIZED FOR FOUR WEEKS TO RECEIVE TREAT
ment and therapy for depression was not the type of thing you publicly disclosed to the world on a whim. Seeking help had effectively ended my career in the Air Force. Would sharing it openly in the press jeopardize further opportunities as I sought a new direction in my life? But if I was going to do it, then I wanted to be honest about it. I wanted to have a chance of helping someone else. Such revelations would be in marked contrast to the picture-perfect layouts in the 1969
Life
magazine where the three of us who reached the moon on the first landing were glamorized in our professional and family lives. If the public responded positively to the idea that an American astronaut “superhero” could be vulnerable to the pitfalls of depression, and brave enough to seek help, then maybe Wayne and I could use that leverage to approach a publisher about a book deal.

On February 27, just a couple of days before I said good-bye to my friends in the Air Force, Wayne’s article appeared in the Sunday edition of the
Los Angeles Times.
The article was titled, “Troubled Odyssey—‘Buzz’ Aldrin’s Saga: Tough Role for Hero.”

Wayne began the article by quoting the psychologist Carl Jung: “Space flights are merely an escape, a fleeing away from oneself, because
it is easier to go to Mars or to the moon than it is to penetrate one’s own being.”

I could bear witness to that. Dealing with the pressure of several times the force of gravity pushing on my chest at liftoff, and keeping cool under the stress of landing on the moon with only a few gasps of fuel remaining in the tank was relatively easy compared to overcoming the enormous pressures and stresses that were unraveling my life. To beat depression I had to look deep within myself, and while much of what I saw there was laudable, the dark areas were equally as forbidding.

Wayne’s article was picked up in syndication and appeared in various forms in newspapers throughout the United States and abroad. The response was immediate and overwhelming. For the most part, the public cared deeply that I had not fared well following my return from the moon.

The
Los Angeles Times
article received such a stirring response from the public that Wayne and I decided to move forward on writing the book that revealed my experiences with depression, because I wanted to stand up and be counted as someone who fought the illness and had won. At that time I did not yet realize that the battles would keep coming, taking various forms, and occurring when I least expected them, and that the victories had to be won on a daily basis, with hard work and perseverance, rather than with a once-and-for-all “Get Out of Jail Free” pass.

Wayne’s story spawned numerous follow-up articles; the public seemed to want to know every gritty detail. Again, most of the newspapers ran the story as a positive statement about mental health. For instance, a headline in the March 4 edition of the
Standard-Times
(New Bedford, MS) read,
YOU’RE A-OK, BUZZ
, and quoted my rationale for coming out publicly about my experiences: “Maybe I can give some person somewhere the courage to face his problems by saying something about mine,” I had said. The article closed in a complimentary fashion:

The
Toledo Blade
took Wayne’s basic story and spun it more negatively, the headline reading,
ALL IS NOT SERENE IN US SPACE PROGRAM. SECOND MAN ON MOON REVEALS STRESS, ANXIETIES CAUSED NERVOUS BREAKDOWN
.
⁴

In an excellent story run the week after the original article appeared, Wayne’s follow-up article included a tease about the book. “[Aldrin’s] story, part of it, was told in Sunday’s
Times;
he will tell more in a book he is writing.”
⁵

Once again, the response to Wayne’s work was quite positive; clearly there was a market for a book. We signed the contracts with Random House to write the book while I was still living at Edwards Air Force Base. Wayne Warga and I would work together on the manuscript over the coming year.

B
Y THE TIME
the kids had finished school in June 1972, Joan and I had packed up our belongings at Edwards Air Force Base and were ready to go. Moving is always an adventure—not necessarily a desirable one, but an adventure nonetheless. On June 3 we moved from sparse Air Force housing to our own home, a rambling ranch house in a “horse” community in Hidden Hills, California, on the west side of the San Fernando Valley, outside Los Angeles. A buddy of mine with whom I had flown in the 22nd Squadron while stationed in Germany during the summer of 1956 happened to be a realtor in Ventura County, and helped me with the purchase of this home, formerly
owned by the L.A. Dodgers’ All-Star pitcher Don Drysdale. The house was replete with a white picket fence and a swimming pool, set on two acres of land dotted with orange trees. Our neighbor across the street was the actor and entertainer John Davidson. Despite the difficulties that had brought us here, this was a dream come true!

We had animals of every kind at our house, thanks to Mike, our family’s most broad-ranging animal lover. But since the community had been built with equestrians in mind, and our daughter Jan owned an Appaloosa horse, we installed a riding ring in front of the house. Behind stood a barn with two stalls, one for the horse and another for the chickens to roost in while they laid their eggs. We also had sheep, goats, and “rolling” pigeons, known for their amazing willful spins and dips while flying.

The pastoral tranquillity of Hidden Hills was a welcome change for me, especially since, during my last few months at Edwards, I was having occasional relapses into depressive behavior. After the Volkswagen commercial aired, I had received a letter castigating me for endorsing the German automaker, and accusing me of being un-American. Ordinarily I would have cast off such worthless drivel as the ruminations of somebody with too much time on his or her hands. But in my unsteady frame of mind, the letter had a devastating effect that fed into the familiar blue funk.

The reprieve I was feeling after our move to Hidden Hills was short lived, however, as I began to fall back into depression. At first I succumbed to my old ways and retreated to my bedroom, but Joan kept prodding me to get help. I called Dr. Sparks in San Antonio, and he suggested that I get in touch with Dr. Flinn, who had seen me briefly prior to the four weeks I spent at Wilford Hall in San Antonio. Back in the early 1960s, Dr. Flinn had certified me at Brooks Air Force Base, where the candidates for the NASA astronaut program went for their physicals, and had given me a passing grade, tantamount to a clean bill of mental health, with no reservations. Now, in the mid-seventies, he was the head of the Neuropsychiatric Institute at UCLA and I was his
patient. On June 23, 1972, I called Dr. Flinn and set up an appointment for that same day.

The doctor helped me sort through all that had happened in recent months, and my recurring apprehension about the future. It was quite understandable, Dr. Flinn explained, that I should experience these feelings, since, for a former astronaut—not to mention one who had walked on the moon—it was totally unreasonable to think that I could have gone back to the Air Force and simply served in obscurity. Moreover, the two accidents that were laid at my feet due to “supervisory error” would have been difficult for any commander. When I was made to feel useless and expendable as a result, that exacerbated existing insecurities about leading the test pilot school in the first place.

Dr. Flinn’s explanation made sense to me, but then he sealed it with a clincher. The real problem, he helped me to realize, was that I didn’t feel that I was
allowed
to have such emotions. As a man, a strong man, a let’s-get-it-done-and-here’s-how-to-do-it man, I was not entitled to fail; when I could not control the situation, feelings of inadequacy and frustration flooded over me. Dr. Flinn helped me to recognize the futility of such feelings, and although it was nice to be regarded as a superman, it was an impossible image to live up to—and I was tired of trying. If someone wanted to go to the moon or even Mars, I could figure out a way to do that, and my competitive spirit would give it 100 percent. But to live up to the image of perfection foisted upon me by others and perpetuated by my own expectations was something I no longer was willing or able to do.

After that appointment, I met with Dr. Flinn periodically until the spring of 1975. During our July 1, 1972, session, we talked about my often misunderstood competitive nature. In his own handwritten physician’s notes, Dr. Flinn recorded this statement: “Others consider him bright, but not smooth or friendly. Competitive. & others may see him as selfish.”
⁶

In subsequent appointments we talked about my apprehension concerning the future, as well as some of the events that still dogged me from the past. When Dr. Flinn asked me about how it felt to be chided as “the
second
man to walk on the moon,” his question opened a Pandora’s box.

Believe it or not, I told him, I hadn’t particularly wanted to be the first man to step on the moon. While we were training for the mission, I went home one night after work and told Joan, “I wish I wasn’t going on the first landing. I’d rather be on the second or third mission to the moon because we’d get to do a lot more scientific experiments and other interesting things, and wouldn’t have to be slaves to the media, after being the first ones to walk on the moon.”

Yet I recognized that in all likelihood that great responsibility would fall on my shoulders. In all the previous Gemini and Apollo missions, the spacewalks—EVAs, as they were known to us—were taken by the junior officer, while the commander remained inside the space capsule. And as of February 1969, that was our plan as well. The
Chicago Daily News
reported as early as February 26, 1969, that I had “been named to be the first human being ever to step onto the moon.”
⁷
The article went on to explain how the decision was made:

“It’s not based on individual desire,” Neil had explained, “but on how the job can be best accomplished on the lunar surface.” The article concluded, “Now, six weeks later, the decision has been firmed up. It could be changed, but is not likely to be.”
⁹

I recognized that we were setting a precedent, so I asked Al Bean, the copilot scheduled for the next mission, “What do you think about this?” Alan recognized, as I did, that historical significance might trump NASA protocol in this case. I posed the question to a few other fellow astronauts, and their response was much the same.

Word soon got around that I was trying to lobby support for my being the first to set foot on the moon’s surface, that I was soliciting the other astronauts’ support in my quest to be the first man on the moon. That wasn’t the case. I was simply behaving like a competitive Air Force fighter pilot would. In truth, I didn’t really want to be the first person to step on the moon. I knew the media would never let that person alone. I suspected that such intense media coverage after my Gemini flight was a major factor in my mother’s suicide. Why would I place myself in a position for even more attention than I was already sure to get, simply by being part of the mission? Also, something inside me said that for such a seminal event, it would be wrong for the commander to sit in the lunar module and watch while a junior copilot made history.