Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth

by Andrew Smith

  There were objections, of course. Dwight Eisenhower came out of retirement specially to proclaim Apollo “just nuts.” Others complained that such a vast government programme would lead to a proto-command economy, in which the state had too much influence, and that it would drain brains from teaching and academia, waste money which could be better spent on social problems and distract attention from security here on Earth. Such concerns were surprisingly muted, though. For one decade, and one decade only, Americans appeared happy, even eager, to place their trust and tax dollar on the collection plate of big government and its scientist priests. In his speech to Congress on May 25, JFK had called for a lively national debate on this bold but reckless proposition. It has been conjectured that he was rather hoping someone would talk him out of it, but no one did. The “debate” in the Senate lasted an hour, with only five of the ninety-six senators even feeling a need to speak.

  The next year, in 1962, Kennedy and Khrushchev danced a samba with the security of the planet through the Cuban Missile Crisis; then a year later came Dallas and the grassy knoll and JFK was just one more piece of Sixties lore. Now this tangled mess of dream and expediency was going to the Moon, and I’m dwelling on it at 25,000 feet on a 737 to Reno for a reason – because two other icons of that era did significant things in 1962. First, Marilyn Monroe, actress and assumed lover of JFK, committed maybe-suicide; then the crack test pilot Neil Armstrong, having spurned an invitation to apply for the Mercury project, joined the second group of astronauts and his own idiosyncratic contribution to the mythology of the Sixties was ready to begin. Reno holds the promise of an extremely rare chance to take a look at, and possibly even meet, the astronaut who holds himself most aloof from the public. The space grapevine has been buzzing with it for weeks.

  From what I’ve heard and read, trying to describe Armstrong is like driving through a night mist: there are outlines and hints of something solid behind it, but any light you throw at him comes straight back at you, until, in the end, you see just what you imagine you see: the reflected glare of your own expectations. And I wonder what I’ll see – if anything at all? The hard-bitten Reg Turnill saw something arrogant and “taciturn,” and when he’d finished showing Norman Mailer around the Cape, Mailer wrote a book called Of a Fire on the Moon in which he got no nearer to Armstrong than anyone else, but offered some interesting observations of his bearing at press conferences. As per the longings in his soul, the novelist saw something mystical.

  “He spoke in long pauses, he searched for words,” Mailer said. “When the words came out, their ordinary content made the wait seem excessive … as a speaker he was all but limp – still it did not leave him unremarkable. Certainly the knowledge that he was an astronaut restored his stature, yet even if he had been a junior executive accepting an award, Armstrong would have presented a quality which was arresting, for he was extraordinarily remote. He was simply not like other men …”

  Mailer later acknowledged that Armstrong’s parsimony with words, perversely, “became his most impressive quality, as if what was best in the man was most removed from the surface, so valuable that it must be protected by a hundred reservations, a thousand cautions.” Mailer also spoke of the astronaut’s down-home public demeanor, “that small-town clearing he had cut into his psyche so that he might offer the world a person.” Wonderful. Yet it seems as likely to me that Armstrong sat at those press conferences knowing that, for the men and women chewing pens in front of him, his wretched smear across on the Sea of Tranquillity would provide just as exciting and profitable a denouement to all this as would the successful conclusion of his beautiful mission, perhaps more … in fact, unquestionably more. They asked him what would happen if the ascent-stage engine failed to ignite as he sought to break Selene’s ethereal embrace and there is a temptation to laugh at his reply, which was: “At the present time we’re left with no recourse should that occur.” But what was he going to say – “Oh, well, then I guess we die”? In fact, the question Mailer asked his reader was much more amusing: “What if Armstrong were to take a step on the moon and simply disappear?” The entire works of Monty Python would have been rendered obsolete. And it could have happened. One NASA employee, asked about the possibility of the LM slipping on ice, commented, “There might be giraffes up there for all we know, so why not ice?” while members of the public wanted to know whether the Moonwalkers would be armed as they stepped out of the spacecraft. Mailer’s pronouncement in the early stages of his book that “the administration had decided to embark upon a surreal adventure” looks about right.

  Insiders confirm this impression of Armstrong. From Michael Collins, we learn that “Neil never admits surprise,” while Guenter Wendt muses that he was “clearly not the conventional astronaut … most would agree that he did not make friends easily.” Apollo 11 flight director Gene Kranz says that the astronaut’s silence took time to get used to and complained that at meetings to formalize the mission rules, which governed when to continue with a problematic landing and when to abort, “Neil would generally smile or nod [and] I believed that he had set his own rules for the landing … I just wanted to know what they were.” No one ever did, but Kranz strongly suspected that while there was the remotest chance of setting down, the commander with the Mona Lisa smile would go for it, whatever Mission Control advised.

  Reg Turnill suggested that a contract negotiated with Life magazine, which gave the journal exclusive rights to the astronauts’ personal stories in exchange for an annual cash lump sum, had exacerbated Armstrong’s truculence with the media. The payment was regarded by the early astronauts as a substitute for danger money and was split evenly between them, but as the cadre grew from seven to over sixty in the decade between 1959 and 1969, a windfall which started out at $18,000 per annum wound up amounting to little. Worse, the stories that appeared were asinine and there was an air of propagandism about the fairy-tale American families that could be found within the pages of arch-patriot proprietor Henry Luce’s organ. Reg and the rest set out to undermine these stories by preempting them, but an unfortunate side effect of this effort was to ruin what trust had existed previously between spacemen and media, particularly once the postflight divorces started happening. Some of the astronauts, this new breed of real-time celebrities at the centre of the first global media event, understandably began to get sensitive about the attention given to their relations with their families.

  “So there was a clampdown,” Turnill explained, “because instead of appearing as gods who were to be worshipped for their perfection, they were being presented as ordinary men and they resented this.”

  He then recited a formula which has echoed through the corridors of celebrity for thirty-five years now, but was new then.

  “Although they liked being icons in a way,” he said, “it started to ruin the fun of it.”

  Some of these men never recovered from their encounter with the new fame that rained down like mortar from satellites in the sky. How unfair it must have seemed, this great quest being assailed by trivia and prurience, infected with other people’s fears and fantasies. Armstrong was particularly resentful of this, according to Turnill.

  “Of course, Armstrong was a great, great pilot,” he admitted, the sour taste still fresh in his mouth after all these years. “But he must be very vain and insecure inside, because he could never deal with the press. We could never talk to him. You ruffled his feathers as soon as you spoke to him, because he’d resent you asking that question – or almost any question. I’ve encountered this with many great men.”

  The situation didn’t improve after the first Moonwalker returned to Earth. Newspaper reports suggest that he was inundated with offers from agents and movie producers and companies eager to sign him up to sponsorship deals, all but a few of which he rejected. A museum in his hometown of Wapakoneta, Ohio, was already being planned and his image was everywhere: he received tens of thousands of letters, including love letters and hate mail, while gossip columni
sts busily linked him with Hollywood starlets. Instead of cashing in, he took a NASA desk job, then a master of science degree from the University of Southern California, before returning to his home state as Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Cincinnati, where he stayed until 1979, commuting from a farm he bought in nearby Lebanon. After the teaching, it was business and a list of anonymous corporations which found value in his profile and gift for precision at boardroom level. For a while, he took part in press conferences once a year, but gave no general interviews, ever, and his public presence eventually faded away. The former Life reporter Dora Jane Hamblin spoke of Armstrong being capable of “cold, tight-lipped rage,” but added that it was mostly reserved for people whom he felt were trying to exploit him. In 1976, a Cincinnati Post article headed “Cincinnati’s Invisible Hero” reported his anguish over an advertisement for the university’s Earth Day celebration, which promised the attendance of “our spaceman.” “How long must it take before I cease to be known as a spaceman?” he is said to have snapped.

  By the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first Moon landing in 1994, the Cincinnati Post was running another piece, this time headed “In Search of the Man in the Moon,” which claimed that “to most of his neighbours, Armstrong may as well be the man on the Moon.” The New York Times went with “In Rural Ohio, Armstrong Quietly Lives on His Own Dark Side of the Moon.” As if to confirm as much, almost no one had noticed when he and Janet, his wife of thirty-eight years, divorced a few months earlier. By July, there were rumours that he had already remarried, but no one could be sure, because the court records were sealed. The Times reporter found that the people of Lebanon wouldn’t talk to him, but when a weeklong celebration of the anniversary took place in Wapakoneta, some townsfolk expressed annoyance that he refused to attend. Even NASA staff are recorded as taking offence at his refusal to sign autographs. All the same, the very few people who can count themselves as friends of the First Man on the Moon insist that he is warm, loyal and friendly, and I hear intriguing rumours of him playing ragtime piano at family get-togethers, which no one seems able to confirm or dismiss.

  You don’t need to be an amateur psychologist to find seeds of all this in his childhood. Armstrong was the eldest of three children, with a mother who looked after the home while his father worked as an auditor for the state of Ohio. This involved inspecting the books of individual counties over the course of a year, after which the family would pack the car and move to the next county, where another rented, furnished apartment or house would be found. Making close friends must have seemed pointless and painful, especially when the family appears to have provided a secure, stable alternative. His mother was a lover of books and music, who taught him to read before he hit school and arranged piano lessons when the family could afford it. He also had an attentive father, who allowed his boy to skip Sunday school for a first plane ride when a visiting flier was in town and became an assistant scout master when Neil joined the Boy Scouts. In the early years, his passion was model airplanes, but by the time high school came, the family had finally settled in Wapakoneta and the available records suggest that he thrived. When he got a job at a local bakery, he used the money to buy a baritone horn and joined the school band; he was on the student council, took part in drama, sang in the “Glee Club” and, for a brief time, played in a jazz group called the Mississippi Moonshiners. His teachers later recalled an excellent student, a perfectionist with an enthusiasm for math, science and astronomy. A neighbour whose telescope the young Armstrong borrowed remembers him as polite, bright, intensely quiet.

  He got his pilot’s licence and graduated high school at the age of sixteen, then won a U.S. Navy scholarship to study aeronautical engineering at Purdue. There is a story that when the acceptance notice came, his mother was so surprised by his shout of joy that she dropped a jar on her toe and was hobbling for days. Thereafter: he was called up to Korea, where he bailed out once, had part of a wing torn off yet wrestled the plane home, and won three air medals; returned to Purdue and met Janet in 1952, but took two years to ask her out (“Neil is never one to rush into anything”); then landed a job as a research pilot for NACA (soon to become NASA) at Edwards in 1956. A son, Eric, was born in 1957 and a daughter, Karen, two years after that. When NASA took on the first astronauts in 1959, he fell for the “Spam in a can” line and didn’t apply, because in an airplane, he was an artist, able to control a twenty-ton machine at Mach 1.5 with the delicacy and grace of a painter applying his brush. Instead, he stayed at Edwards and flew the now legendary X-15 rocket plane seven times, coaxing her to 200,000 feet and almost 4,000 miles per hour. When the next intake of astronauts was announced in April 1962, though, he applied and was selected from a field of 253, one of two civilians in his group, the other being Elliott See, whose death gifted Buzz Aldrin his place on Gemini 12. That must have been a strange and unsettled year in the Armstrong household; three months earlier, on her parents’ sixth anniversary, Karen had died of an inoperable brain tumour. Another son, Mark, was born in 1963.

  In 1966, Armstrong became the first civilian to fly in space, on Gemini 8 with David Scott, by which time he was already riling reporters. One grumbled that “He disdains all talk about people. He prefers to talk about ideas and hardware.” Immediately prior to Apollo 11, the Journal Herald of Dayton, Ohio, asked how he felt about his chance to be the first person on the Moon and the gods of language ran screaming from the room.

  “I’m certainly not going to say that I’m without emotion at the thought,” he confessed, “because that wouldn’t be factual … I don’t think very much about the emotional aspects.”

  Son Mark was more eloquent, with his “My daddy’s going to the Moon. It will take him three days to get there. I want to go to the Moon someday with my daddy.” Like the rest of us, Mark would never get the chance.

  It’s reckoned that almost 600 million people watched the landing, in a world containing a fraction of the number of TV sets that it does today. The most curious thing about Armstrong then was the fact that even at the age of thirty-nine, he looked no older than twenty-six. As Mailer said, “something particularly innocent or subtly sinister was in the gentle remote air.” And I know how Mailer felt as I rattle into Reno on a casino courtesy bus, then pick my way between the slot machines in a lengthy search for the elevator and my room at the Sands Regency.

  The place is heaving because the National Air Races are in town. Last time, they had to be cancelled because of the still-unfolding disaster in New York, but this year they’re pugnaciously back and on Saturday something special is scheduled: an Apollo Astronauts Reunion Dinner, featuring a lineup of Apollo and Skylab spacemen who will attend as honorary race marshals. Buzz will be there and so will Dick Gordon, and interest among Apollo buffs was politely enthusiastic until a rumour got out that “Neil” might appear, at which point chat-room roofs were raised and a mad scramble for seats began. The difficulty was that single places were not for sale. The only way to make it was to buy a table, starting at $1,000 and rising to $5,000, and it took me a hair-tearing week and five hundred bucks to track down a spare seat at the table of a kindly space-nut dentist named Bill. He told me that the race authorities had made it as difficult as possible for him to buy his table, because the dinner had been shaping up as a nice industry jolly until word got out about Armstrong – at which point the fans descended in pestering droves, as if pouring from some embarrassing rip in the fabric of the race-jock universe. But I got my ticket. Now I’m here.

  I had a fantasy as a boy, born of being marched through casinos longing to stop and bathe in the sights and sounds and smells, the flashing lights and falling coins and free whiskey sours distributed by smiling waitresses in costumes that remade breasts as satin warheads, but not being allowed to because of my age and the strict Nevada gaming regulations, which didn’t even sanction you to stop and look. When I grew up, I said, I was going to get a Harley and drift through the mountains to hit the tables in this
town, and I suppose what I had in mind was the posters that hung in the shopping mall of Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson astride their choppers in Easy Rider.

  A few years after that film’s release (within months of Armstrong’s touchdown), we sneaked into the local cinema to see it and the scene I remember most was where the hippy drifters sit around a campfire, licking their wounds after a brush with some local rednecks, and Nicholson drawls, “Oh, yeah, they gonna talk to you and talk to you and talk to you about individual freedom, but they see a free individual, it’s gonna scare ’em” (he’s right, too, because that night the rednecks sneak into the woods and kill him). Clearly, in my boy’s imagination the casinos of Reno represented the kind of freedom Jack was talking about, but now, through jaded grown-up eyes, I see only squalor, the most melancholy place I’ve ever been – more so than Helsinki in winter or Colombo in Sri Lanka, which has the excuse of a long-running civil war. The one-armed bandits pall quickly and the gaming tables sit in a fug of desperation, yet at nine in the morning there are people with beers in front of them, shovelling money as if in a trance. I’ve never seen pawnshop superstores before, nor corner shops selling Devil’s Food Cake lite.

  So on Friday morning I’m pleased to be in the open air, or at least riding a bus on my way to some. The Stead airfield nestles in the feathery hills just north of Reno. The astronauts did their survival training near here, and the notorious Area 51, where the Roswell alien was purportedly held and hoax theorists claim the Moon landings to have been filmed, is a rocket’s flight into the scrub and powder soil. Some of the fighter pilot astronauts learned to fly combat here, too: in Carrying the Fire, Michael Collins notes that twenty-two of his classmates died on the eleven-week course. Today, his heirs, plane enthusiasts, speed junkies, thrill-seekers to a man (and occasionally a woman), will skim tight circles around a series of pylons erected in the high desert, so close that they could almost reach out of their canopies and high-five each other, and low enough to the dust devils on the plain that you feel as though you’re right in there among them. It’s a dangerous business, an American pioneer thing that would have safety officials throwing themselves off cliffs in the U.K. or anywhere else, but by God, it’s exciting to watch. This year, for the first time, they have a jet class, with eight pilots flying old Czech L-39s, which have been cheap to buy since the fall of the Iron Curtain.