Magnificent Desolation (19 page)

What I really wanted was a new role in space exploration, but nothing significant arose, at least as far as I could see. When I was working with Wayne Warga on my first book, I had plenty of time to realize just how integrally my life was interconnected with space, since so little activity was going on in space exploration during that time. We launched Skylab in 1973; we sent people to it in ′73 and ′74. Then, in 1975, we cooperated with the Russians in Apollo Soyuz. Much to my chagrin, space exploration was dead; I felt somewhat lifeless, too.

Disingenuous reporters described me as suffering from mental illness. Today that would not even raise an eyebrow, but in 1973–74, those words held the power to ground any career, no matter how highflying it had been.

In retrospect, being so forthcoming in
Return to Earth
may have worked against me. Shortly after the book appeared in print, Mutual of Omaha’s chairman of the board, V. J. Skutt, asked me to resign, saying I was no longer a good figurehead for the company. Although I intended for my story to encourage people dealing with similar conditions to seek help, it also branded me as a philanderer and as a person who was mentally ill, in a constant battle with depression. Neither label was accurate, but I felt that despite the misconceptions, it was worth putting everything out on the table so people could deal with it and so I could move on with my life. Most of the public response to the book was wonderfully positive, although some people had difficulty accepting that an American astronaut and hero could be vulnerable to depression.

Although my honest and straightforward disclosure in the book proved damaging to me in some ways, it provided hope and inspiration to many other people—especially men, who, in the mid-seventies,
were not accustomed to admitting that they struggled with depression. Everywhere I went, men thanked me for bringing the issue to the forefront. “I’ve never been able to admit that I needed it before,” some guys told me, “but thanks to your example, I’m seeking help.”

To me, that made the revelations in the book worthwhile, even though my father was appalled.

Nevertheless, after the original op-ed came out in the
Los Angeles Times
in 1972 about my hospitalization for depression, I was asked to serve on the board of directors of the National Association for Mental Health (NAMH). I was delighted to participate if my celebrity could help shed light on the subject. NASA probably did not see it that way, but I didn’t mind.

Then, after
Return to Earth
came out and made such a splash, I was invited to serve as the 1974 national chairman for a one-year term, thanks to a suggestion by Bill Perry, NAMH’s communication director. Bill had read my book, and wanted to know if I was serious when I closed the story by saying that I wanted to stand up and be counted as a person who has had to deal with depression and mental health issues. Bill worked with me to set up a series of appearances as the NAMH chairman to speak to mental health groups across the country, and the first one was to take place in Detroit. We became good friends, and we traveled together frequently for NAMH. My role was to attract a crowd to mental health events, and part of Bill’s job was to promote the events and arrange media interviews for me while we were in town.

Bill was impressed by my high energy, but he had no idea how serious my own depression and drinking were until he spent seven days at our home in Hidden Hills. He had come out to accompany me in making some planned public appearances on behalf of NAMH, but while Bill was visiting, I fell into a funk in which I didn’t get out of bed for four straight days.

When I did get up that week, I drank a fifth of Scotch or Jack Daniel’s each day, and during that time somehow we misplaced four cars. I’d park a car, then we’d go off and do something, and I couldn’t remember where I had parked. We temporarily lost my little red Saab
sports car, a Ford Ranchero that my daughter Jan used to pick up hay for her horse, and even a pop-top Volkswagen camper! Eventually we found the vehicles, but it did cause Bill real concern. He recognized that I drank far more than most people, but could still function, seemingly with my faculties relatively unimpaired.

Bill was with me in Minneapolis when we got together with Princess Margaret of Great Britain. After an evening function, we were in a bar around midnight having a drink with Dave Zigenhaugen, the executive director of the Mental Health Association in Minneapolis. “It’s nice to have two celebrities in town,” Dave said.

With several drinks already in me, I looked at Dave impishly and said, “Two? Who’s the other one?”

“Princess Margaret.”

“Oh, I know her,” I said. “I met her on the world tour after the
Apollo 11
moon landing. I’d like to see her.”

“Well, she’s leaving in a day or two, so I doubt that would be possible,” Dave said.

“Of course, it’s possible,” I replied. I had an idea. Somewhere around midnight, I started calling the Minnesota governor’s mansion, trying to get someone who could set up a meeting with Princess Margaret. The next morning I was doing a television interview at 8:00 a.m., and while I was on the set, Bill received a telephone call from the governor’s office, informing us that the Princess would see me. We met with Princess Margaret and Lord Snowden at 11:00 a.m. that morning, and it became a big story in Minneapolis. Bill was duly impressed.

Bill knew that I could perform in front of a crowd. “It’s like you’re a refrigerator, and when you open the door the light comes on,” he said. “You’re always ready to go!” Bill usually wrote some general remarks for me to include in my talks, carefully guiding me away from any technical areas of mental health, since I was not an expert. All I really knew was derived from my own personal experience, so I talked freely about my depression, how I went from being on top of the world and landing on the moon, to plunging into an abyss after I returned to Earth.

Bill and I were a good team—until I started missing scheduled
events. The first time I failed to show up at an NAMH event, Bill did his best to cover for me. More than eight thousand people had gathered in Indianapolis for an NAMH annual meeting, when I called Bill on Sunday afternoon to inform him that I wasn’t feeling well, and that I couldn’t make it. I wasn’t lying to him; I wasn’t feeling well, but my condition was not a physical sickness so much as mental and emotional.

“Don’t worry about it, Buzz. I’ll figure out something,” Bill said. He frantically called Percy Knauth, a former Time-Life reporter from Magic Bay, Connecticut, and asked him to pinch hit for me. Percy consented and did a fantastic job, but Bill’s hosts were not happy that I was not with him when he got off the plane in Indiana.

After that first no-show, it became easier for me to back out of meetings when I got down on myself. With increasing frequency I gave in to the depression. I’d contact Bill and inform him that I would not be making it to a scheduled event. Once, I had already arrived at the hotel, and I still called Bill and told him that I could not do the event. Bill never got angry, but I could tell that he was extremely disappointed in me, and embarrassed for me. Percy Knauth was a good speaker, and he got quite a workout filling in at events for me.

On the other hand, when I was on, I enjoyed being with Bill and his fellow mental health workers, and found many of them to be intellectually stimulating. For instance, one night after an event in Chicago, Bill Rice, a vice president with NAMH, and I sat up all night long talking through the theory of relativity! Rice was a bright mathematician from Salt Lake City, and we talked the night away, as I downed one drink after another.

On another occasion we were in Florida, where we met Richard Bach, author of the huge bestseller
Jonathan Livingston Seagull.
Bach was a pilot, so we sat up trading airplane stories, playing a game of “Can you top this?”

“Have you ever flown a Tiger Moth?” Richard asked.

“No, but I’d like to.”

“Well, I have one.”

The next day we went out to the private airport where Bach kept his planes. He gave me a quick overview of the Tiger Moth, and said, “Take it up and see how it flies.” I climbed in the cockpit, and Bach took the copilot’s seat. He flew with me for the first lap around the area, then let me take the controls. I put the plane through its paces, and when I landed the Tiger Moth, I looked at Bach with a grin and said, “What else ya got?”

Perhaps one of the worst disappointments to Bill was the time I scrubbed a scheduled speech at the District of Columbia Mental Health Association, and decided to remain home in Los Angeles because my depression had struck again. It was obviously never good to miss an engagement, but especially one in the Washington, D.C., area, where we could get some much-needed attention from Congress. But maybe that’s what caused my consternation, that I felt I couldn’t close the sale.

Bill made the excuses for me, telling the media that I was receiving medication and undergoing therapy. “He’s on the down side of a depression cycle,” Bill said, putting it mildly. Bill told the press that I had spoken in Minneapolis the previous week and I had been fine. “I think the thing Buzz wants to get out is that you can’t hide a mental illness. He tells his own story and how he’s coming out of it. I think he overestimated how far along he was.”

One night Joan and I were attending an event in Antelope Valley honoring General Jimmy Doolittle. I enjoyed the evening and drank more than usual. Driving home in our sporty, red, two-passenger Saab Sonett, I got mixed up and was going the wrong way on some of the backstreets of Palmdale. I was angry with myself for having gotten lost, so for some totally illogical reason I decided to floor it, as though driving faster would get us out of the predicament more quickly. I headed south down an unfamiliar road, when we suddenly came to a “T” intersection and were supposed to stop, but some tree branches shrouded the stop sign and, driving as fast as I was, I didn’t see the sign until it was too late. We went through the intersection, hit a ditch, and went airborne, landing upright but with a horrible crash. Joan’s head
slammed into the dashboard, and my body whipped forward and back violently, as well. Fortunately we were wearing seatbelts—a habit not practiced then as generally as it is now. Joan escaped with some bumps and two black eyes, and I survived with just some bruises, but the car was severely damaged.

Joan and I crawled out of the crumpled car and surveyed the damage. Because the car couldn’t be driven and we were out in the middle of nowhere, we started walking toward town. Before long, a motorist came along and offered us a ride. The police did not go out to the accident scene for several hours, so I was never checked for intoxication levels, but no doubt my judgment was impaired by the alcohol. It was a condition that would unfortunately get much worse before it got better.

   9

I
N EARLY
1974,
A
H
OLLYWOOD TELEVISION AND MOVIE PRO
ducer, Rupert Hitzig, came to our home in Hidden Hills to offer a formal proposal for the television movie based on
Return to Earth.
Rupert had written the Broadway musical hit
Pippin
, had produced an installment of ABC’s
Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell
, and was in partnership with the well-known comedian Alan King.

A friendly fellow, Rupert was fascinated by our home’s “moon” décor, including a life-sized photo of the “visor shot,” as the famous picture of me on the moon was now known. Much to my delight, Rupert was especially intrigued by our “Moon Room,” which featured a well-stocked bar. I had found a new drinking buddy.

“Come on, let’s get a drink,” I said, motioning for Rupert to sit down at the bar. It was only twelve-thirty in the afternoon. We talked and drank, talked and drank. Rupert loved drinking as much as I did, and we downed one gin and tonic after another. Rupert and I talked much about our fathers—his was a doctor in New York, who sounded almost as opinionated and overbearing as my father. We both chuckled over my dad’s outrage when the U.S. Post Office issued the stamp with Neil Armstrong’s image and the caption “First Man on the Moon,” though of course I had been taken aback as well. Rupert laughed uproariously when I told him that besides lobbying the post office incessantly,
my father went so far as to picket in front of the White House, with a huge placard bearing the message, “My Son Was First, Too.” By the time Rupert and I actually got around to signing the contracts, we were sloshed.

We arranged a follow-up meeting a few weeks later, at the Beverly Hills Polo Lounge at five o’clock. I arrived at the Lounge before 1:00 p.m. By the time Rupert showed up shortly before five, along with his friend John Roach, I was thoroughly intoxicated. Rupert tried to talk business with me, but my interest wavered, as did my conversation. At one point Rupert leaned toward me and spoke quietly but firmly, “Buzz, don’t you understand what a hero you are? Don’t you realize that every person in this room knows who you are and what you did on July 20, 1969?”

“Nobody remembers where they were on July 20, 1969,” I groused.

“I’ll prove it to you,” Rupert said. A young man who looked as though he could have been in a heavy-metal rock band was passing by our table, and Rupert reached out and grabbed his arm. “Excuse me,” Rupert said. “Where were you on July 20, 1969?”

The rocker looked at me, then back at Rupert as though he’d lost his marbles. “How should I know?” he answered, shaking off Rupert’s grip and continuing on his way. That was the last thing I needed to hear. I ordered another drink.

Despite my attitude, Rupert was determined to see
Return to Earth
made as a movie, and we agreed to press on to build the production team and sell the project to a television network as a made-for-TV feature-length movie. At least I think that’s what we agreed to, because that’s what Rupert did. He said that he had high hopes of getting a first-rate actor, Cliff Robertson, involved in the project, as well as an attractive female to play Marianne. Rupert had my attention.

“What do I need to do?” I asked.

“Nothing right now. I’ll be back in touch as soon as we have all the pieces of the puzzle put together.” Rupert went his way while I had one more drink for the road, or maybe it was two or three.

F
OR REASONS INEXPLICABLE
to me at the time, life just kept tumbling down around me. I would talk with aerospace companies about future projects, and they seemed quite enthusiastic, but when nothing materialized, my spirits would sink again. I had formed my own company a few years earlier, Research and Engineering Consultants, but that was going nowhere, too. At about the time my book came out, I was consulting with North American Rockwell on the development of the space shuttle, and they liked my ideas, but that door had closed as well. It seemed that everywhere I turned—my marriage, my career, my expectations as an American hero—life was unraveling all around me. With no mission or goal on which to focus, those words I’d uttered on the moon—“magnificent desolation”—mocked me as a poignant description of my life on Earth.

Increasingly, I saw divorce as an escape to a new life. My roller-coaster ride wasn’t doing Joan and the kids any good, and divorce seemed a viable option. When I discussed it with my father, at first he was opposed to my divorcing Joan, but not because he felt we had such a happy home. The book had been bad enough, but at least we had pulled our marriage back together by the last page. To divorce now, after that ugly blot on my name, could be the death knell. He was more concerned about appearances, worried that an all-American astronaut should not be seen as anything but a successful, happily married family man. Of course, Dad had not been able to overcome the unhappiness my mother had suffered, so I wasn’t surprised by his stance.

My father was especially upset that I confessed to having periods of depression. As a retired Air Force colonel who had gone on to earn his doctorate at MIT, and had become a successful aviation executive, he no doubt thought that my admissions were trivial matters that should be kept private. One would think that we had received enough wake-up calls in our family. After all, my mother lived many of her days struggling with the effects of depression, and eventually ended her life rather than face another day. I can’t imagine that my father’s obsession
with my being the All-American boy surpassed his desire for me to be well.

But he was reluctant to admit that my problems were internal, psychological, rather than something I acquired, something imposed upon me as a result of going to the moon. Even after Wayne’s articles and my book came out, he preferred to blame my difficulties on external influences. In one interview in which a reporter suggested that possibility, Dad concurred. “We have to have an open mind,” he said. “Who is all-seeing to know what effect the moon might have on people? It has to be explored more. If the moon can affect tides, why couldn’t it influence someone’s judgment? We may be afraid of the answers, and Buzz deserves credit to come out and face that situation.” My father even suggested that perhaps other astronauts had been adversely affected, too, and just weren’t telling. “Maybe more guys are hiding things and won’t admit them,” he said.

I
COMMUNICATED WITH
few friends during this time, at least not on any meaningful basis or about anything other than potential space projects. I can’t recall ever sharing my pain with another male friend or confiding in anyone that I was struggling to hold life together. Nor was I in touch with any of my fellow astronauts during this period; we had all gravitated away to new phases of our lives. There was little esprit de corps among the third group of astronauts, and certainly very little other than superficial interaction away from the workplace. While some of them, I later learned, had heard that I was having problems, I never heard from any of them, and frankly didn’t expect anything to the contrary.

More and more, I turned to alcohol to ease my mind and see me through the rough times. Because I could handle my drinking—or so I thought—and could consume a lot of alcohol without becoming uncontrollably inebriated, I refused to see it as a problem. I had been relatively open about my battle with depression, but I was not so forthcoming about my drinking problems. As far as I could see, there
was nothing wrong. It was a time when almost everyone I knew was drinking heavily, so why not me?

When I was not drinking, my thoughts tended to lead me to a deeper sense of self-evaluation and introspection. What am I doing? What is my role in life now? I realized that I was experiencing the “melancholy of things done.” I had done all that I had ever set out to do.

Worse still, when I left NASA and the Air Force, I had no more structure in my life. For the first time in more than forty years I had no one to tell me what to do, no one sending me on a mission, giving me challenging work assignments to be completed. Ironically, rather than feeling an exuberant sense of freedom, an elation that I was now free to explore on my own, I felt isolated, alone, and uncertain. Indeed, as a fighter pilot in Korea, making life-or-death decisions in a fraction of a second, and then as an astronaut who had to evaluate data instantly, I consistently made good decisions. Now, as I contemplated asking Joan for a divorce, I found that I could not make even the simplest decisions. I moved from drinking to depression to heavier drinking to deeper depression. I recognized the pattern, but I continually sabotaged my own efforts to do anything about it.

By Christmas 1974, I had mustered enough will to divorce Joan. We had planned to take our three children to Acapulco for the holiday season, and this was where I would lay out my intentions to her. I actually thought that divorce might be a relief to Joan. After all, she had witnessed so much of my withdrawal into myself since returning from the moon, she even said at times that she didn’t feel I was the same person she had married. She told me that she would never walk away quietly and grant me the divorce, that she would fight for all she could get financially in divorce proceedings. I think she felt that if she could slow me down with financial concerns, she might be able to delay the divorce long enough to save our marriage. But I didn’t care about money; I never really did, and still don’t today. To me, money is a commodity that a person must have to function, not a goal in itself.

While Joan and I bounced from vitriolic conversations to silent, sullen, peaceful coexistence in the beachside hotel room, my sister Fay
Ann called to say that while visiting with her family for Christmas in San Francisco, Dad had suffered a heart attack. He was in the hospital. “It doesn’t look good, Buzz,” she said. I racked my brain trying to decide what to do. Should I head for California, or remain in Mexico? I was already up to my neck in stress from trying to deal with my relationship with Joan, and I figured that Dad was either going to recover or he was going to die before I could get there. Fay Ann was staying with him in the hospital, so I remained in Acapulco with Joan and the kids. The extra days did nothing to improve our relationship, and on December 28, before I left Acapulco, Dad died from complications stemming from the heart attack; he was seventy-eight years of age.

Because of his military service, Dad was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. Joan and our children did not attend the funeral, partially because of the costs involved in travel from California to Washington, D.C., but more because I chose to go alone. I stood stoically—as expected—while the uniformed soldiers carried my father’s casket across the frozen grass. My face remained equally as frozen as the casket was placed in position, the flag presented to my oldest sister, and the lonely sound of a trumpet playing “Taps” echoed across the rows of white tombstones. I didn’t flinch or shed a tear during the ceremony, but later that night I drowned my sorrows with alcohol.