by Andrew Smith
One of J. G. Ballard’s stories contains the striking line: “The best astronauts, Franklin had noticed during his work for NASA, never dreamed …” But before his flight, Charlie had a dream that he and John Young were driving the rover across the lunar surface, when they found another set of tracks. They asked Houston if they could follow them and wound up confronted by another rover, in which sat two people who looked exactly like them, but had been there for thousands of years. The dream was so pure and so vivid that Charlie is apt to call it “one of the most real experiences of my life.” In the event, however, the reality was exciting for Duke but not mystical or spiritual as it was for some. On the flight before (Apollo 15), Jim Irwin had found the crystalline “Genesis Rock,” a 4.15-billion-year-old relic of primordial crust formed in the Moon’s infancy – in geologic terms, mere moments after the solar system itself was born. It just sat there on a rocky pulpit at the edge of a crater, as if it had been waiting for him all that time and he said he felt the presence of God then, heard His voice, and upon returning, he quit NASA to found the High Flight ministry. A year later, he embarked on the first of several expeditions to search for Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat in Turkey, which the novelist Julian Barnes used as a template for one of the short stories in his book A History of the World in 10½ Chapters. He almost died after a bad fall on Ararat’s slopes in 1982, but lived on until 1991, when a second massive heart attack finally took him. The thing was, everyone had known this was coming, because NASA medics discovered alarming irregularities in his heartbeat while he was on the lunar surface. Despite all the monitoring and all the tests, these had never shown up before. It seemed that the Moon, with her bardic sense of mischief, was playing the equivocator again, revealing Irwin’s calling while simultaneously foretelling his death.
Duke had none of that. He felt so at home up there that he had to resist an urge to take his helmet off, because if he did the vacuum was ready to seize his insolent body and turn it inside out. It was when he got back that the strange stuff started to happen. There were the parades, the White House meetings, congressional addresses and appointment to the backup crew for Apollo 17. He was only thirty-six and for a while, “was sort of floating like I was back in orbit again,” until he began to hear that same whisper as everybody else: What do I do now? A highly compromised shuttle had been approved, but was way down the line. And he felt bored. The light had gone out. So he took his excess energy and decided to make some money – just decided to – and did. The thing was, the astronauts, though poor, found themselves sitting at the peak of the manhood steeple and were to powerful businessmen what the Spice Girls would be to eight-year-old girls one day. They were always being courted by the moneymen and now Charlie used one of the connections he’d made to set up a beer distribution business in San Antonio. It was hard work, but soon the cash was rolling in. Charlie was a success all over again.
Meanwhile, as Dotty tells it, she was slowly falling apart. The pair had met in August 1962, in Boston, where Charlie was taking a masters in engineering. Like so many aspects of these stories, the facilitator was chance, even if Charlie purports to have known instantly that she was the one.
“I was coming up twenty-seven and I’d had a lot of experiences, I’d dated a lot of girls in Germany. But she just captivated me. When I went home the next day to South Carolina, I told my mom I’d met the girl I was going to marry.”
He stops and laughs.
“Even though I think she was not looking for an Air Force officer–slash–engineer to settle down with.”
Dotty was five years younger, from a comfortable family in Atlanta, Georgia. She’d just completed an art degree and spent the summer touring Europe, so Charlie must have been different for her.
“Yes, in a way I probably worried that he might be square. Not square in the sense of being a nerd type of square, but in the sense of not being free, ’cos I was a kind of free spirit. And I put him to a test on that, to see if he could accept that in me. And he did fine.”
I ask what the test was and Dotty smiles.
“It was rolling down a hill. It was in the fall and I wanted to see what his reaction was.”
What did he do?
“He just rolled down with me. It was very good. So he passed that test.”
Charlie courted her assiduously and they were engaged in November, then married in June but married life disappointed Dotty straightaway. Her new husband’s studies were being funded by the Air Force, who insisted on a B grade-average. The problem was that MIT was a tough school and with all this dedicated courting, his grades had slipped to the point where he found himself on probation and forced to focus on his studies. Dotty suddenly found that even when he was home, his head was in books. She hoped that when the master’s was won, they’d move and things would get better, but they wound up in the desert at Edwards and he was studying just as hard – and now she was also competing with airplanes for attention. Looking back, Dotty thinks that her expectations of marriage were based on the fairy stories she’d been told as a girl, and therefore doomed from the start, but she sees a generality in them, too.
“I think our marriage was typical of so many women of my generation who entered a marriage thinking that this was the beginning of a wonderful closeness and romance and fulfilling each other’s needs and this sort of thing. And I’ve probably come to see that most men enter marriage with more of this hunter instinct, which I think is ingrained, which is ‘You’ve caught her and you’re married and so now you can get on with the rest of your life.’ So where the woman sees the marriage as a beginning, he sees it as something which is done. And that certainly happened – as soon as we got married, the courtship, the romance, the beautiful close relationship that we had with each other kind of – ha! – stopped.”
They struggled through, but it was rocky. Like everyone else around the Astronaut Corps, they’d somehow understood that breaking up would mean the end of an astronaut’s career and were surprised when the first divorce occurred in the home of Donn Eisele in 1971, and nothing happened. Still the Dukes made it through, but by the end of the 1970s, Dotty says that she felt directionless and suicidal, while Charlie had turned into what he himself characterizes as a remote partner and a brutal, alcoholic father. His brother, Bill, who’d grown up to be a doctor, disapproved of Charlie peddling beer, feeling that it was a betrayal of his responsibilities as an American hero and role model to the young. But Charlie didn’t care. He was making good money. He liked beer and if he didn’t sell it, someone else would. Only in quieter moments would he admit to himself that he was bored, as he had been at NASA after Apollo.
Dotty tells me that during this time, she tried everything to reinvigorate, then sedate herself. There was an exciting career with a travel agency, some rewarding charity work, self-help books, alcohol, flirtation with other men, even – get this – drugs, in the form of marijuana. The list is so exhaustive, so neat, that at one point a little lion tamer in my head is forced to grab a chair and fend off that song of the Seventies, “I’ve Never Been to Me” by Charlene. But clearly, Dotty was very unhappy. She thought about divorce, but couldn’t face it. Charlie didn’t know what to do with her depression and pulled away, which made her feel lonelier.
“It seemed like all he wanted from me was to cook his meals, take care of the children, and stay out of his way until called upon. My life was to revolve around his needs, but my needs weren’t being met.”
What fascinates me most is that her decision to seek resolution in Jesus was just that – a decision. There was no Mitchell/ Bean/Irwin-style epiphany. There was no emotion at all. She’d always been to church, but in the routine way of the conservative South. Her religion had been about the laudable aims of being good and helping other people. In essence, the Golden Rule. Now she said:
“God, I don’t know if You are real; Jesus, I don’t know if You are the Son of God. But I have made a mess of my life, and if You are real, You can have my life. If You are not real
, I want to die.”
So she handed over her skepticism, her will, her life, just like that. She says that she kept it to herself to begin with, but over the coming months a kind of peace descended and she found herself able for the first time to forgive Charlie his drunken rages and rejections and insensitivity – because as any overworked marriage counsellor will tell you, this is the biggest challenge to repairing any relationship. Yet it was so simple once the decision was made. She says God told her not to try to change or save or chastise Charlie, just to be bold enough to love him with no conditions attached. So she did, then felt better, and the love now flowing through her faith seemed to lift some of the burden on her husband’s love. He saw the transformation in Dotty and eventually asked God to give him the strength to love his wife, and he duly found it. The beer was still an issue, but Dotty dealt with that in her own inimitable way, praying, “God, if you want Charlie in the beer business, give him peace … but if you don’t, make him so miserable that he sells out!” And so it came to pass that one night, Charlie poured a drink and it might as well have emanated direct from Gordon Cooper, it tasted so bad. He sold his share of the business for a tidy sum and gave up the booze. He started a commercial-real-estate development company and set about repairing his relationship with the sons he’d terrorized. His disappointment at being Earthbound forever after Apollo vanished. Things were on their way to getting better.
I have no religion and probably never will, so I don’t know why I enjoy hearing all this so much, but I do. Perhaps it’s the idea that you can make a smart decision to suspend the faculties that we most associate with intelligence: skepticism and independence … the idea that under certain circumstances, dispensing with intelligence might be the most intelligent thing a person could ever do. Charlie smiles when I ask if he still thinks of the Moon trip as “the dust of my life”?
“Well, that was probably a little bit exaggerated,” he says, “but I tried to use the analogy of the Moondust, you know, and kicking around in the dust. No, the Moon flight was a big experience for me, a great adventure – and I’d do it again, Andrew. So it wasn’t inconsequential for me – I didn’t mean it that way – it’s more from an internal sense.”
But he’d choose his faith over it?
“Oh, yeah, definitely.”
The singsong voice of Mission Control. I remark that it’s hard to reconcile this Charlie with the despot he describes after the flight. It’s as though he’s talking about a completely different person.
Charlie and Dotty both laugh knowingly.
“Oh, totally,” Charlie explains. “Oh, yeah, God changes us on the inside. I mean, I have an explosive temper and I was a very stern father and I was a big flirt, you know, and that frustrated Dotty.”
“He was critical,” says Dotty.
“Yeah, I had a critical spirit, you know.”
They’re funny together like this, trading lines from the same story, the Lord’s Sonny and Cher. Was he really that bad as a father?
“Well, I mean I wanted to be a good father, because I did love my children. So my motives were good, but my method was madness.”
In what way?
“I was trying to spur them on. In the military, a lot of times you spur people on with criticism. I learned that in the Naval Academy. My father was very critical. My parents fought a lot in their marriage. They stayed together, but had a very contentious relationship.”
Charlie talks of coaching his two boys at soccer and Little League baseball when Apollo was done and he had more time on his hands; of how he was absurdly demanding, “not only with my kids, but with the whole team – ’cos I wanted victory.” I suggest that this isn’t surprising, because he had just come from the most competitive environment on Earth; then Dotty nods her head vigorously and goes “uh-huh, mm-hmm” as I relate what Alan Bean said about some of the guys still engaging in one-upmanship when he bumps into them. Charlie breezes past this, saying that it was all “just good, healthy competition,” but Dotty sticks up for Bean, saying:
“I can see how someone would think the way Alan thinks. Charlie was not introspective. He did not think about feelings and try to figure people out or anything like that. He was just positive – gonna be great, let’s do it. Alan’s not like that, he’s more sensitive and he would look at people’s feelings and think about those things a lot more. There’s a different personality there.”
Charlie nods doubtfully.
“Fortunately, our kids don’t remember much of the hard times,” he says. “And I thank God for that; I think it’s a miracle. As for forgiveness, the boys said, ‘Well, that’s okay, Dad.’ And then I found that it’s a fine line between discipline and discouragement as a father. I prayed a lot about that, asking, ‘How do I do that?’ ”
We talk about that idea of “finding the strength to love my wife,” which seems a radical notion to me and most of my Fifties/Sixties/Seventies-born friends. We’ve come to assume that love just is or isn’t, is true or not. That it’s irreducible.
“Well, yes,” says Charlie. “You have to have that strength, but first it was a decision, ‘Lord, I want to love my wife, I want to make this marriage work … please give me the strength and the guidance and the wisdom to do that.’ As Dotty says, love is a decision. You decide to love somebody.”
The very opposite of what the songs say.
The doorbell rings and Charlie announces that the “gutter guy” is here. He goes off to meet him, leaving Dotty and me alone. She hands me a copy of a pamphlet she wrote telling the story of her conversion, and flashes her eyes.
“Of course, I was thinking of your book in terms of trying to help people. That was why I was talking about women going into marriage, ’cos I thought that people could relate to that.”
I tell her that I’m sure they will, one way or another, then ask whether she thinks her trials were common to the other wives? She sighs and shakes her head. Her face combines smile and grimace in a way that few could manage.
“We didn’t talk about it,” she says.
Was it as difficult for the women as people tend to assume?
“Well, look at the divorces. I know that one woman divorced her husband and she’s sorry now that she did, but I think she was, ‘Well, he’s done his thing, I want to go do my thing now.’ So she reacted that way. I’m sure there was this feeling of being abandoned. So a good number have divorced in that situation.”
We move on to the “Original Wives Club,” Dotty explaining that the ones who generally come are the ones who are single now, because it’s their only remaining contact with the programme.
“So they really love to come. It’s a neat thing. They can get that support and that encouragement. Not very many of them have remarried, not very many at all.”
She names a couple of the women who’ve remarried then broken up again, and some more who never wanted to try again. The high divorce rate is much commented on, I note, wondering whether it was to do with dissatisfaction on the men’s part when they got back to real life, or the “rock star syndrome,” or just the pressure of an absurdly demanding job?
“I think it was just the typical thing. The lack of attention that the women were given. The men were held up as heroes, while the women were doing the hard work at home. But I guess that, really, most of them were because of the affairs that were going on.”
Gutter guy seen to, Charlie’s returned now.
“Well,” he says, “you have to look at what causes the affairs, too. Most of the time, the affairs were the symptom. The cause of that was – ”
Dotty interjects with some urgency.
“But there was a lot of temptation. Every wife had to deal with the knowledge that her husband was a hero and considered prize game by good-looking women wherever they went. And it was accepted, I think, that the idea among the men was, ‘Sure.’ At least that’s how it seemed to me: ‘We got this availability …’ It didn’t seem to be frowned on.”
In 1977, the Life int
erviewer Dora Jane Hamblin wrote: “I think Life treated the men and their families with kid gloves. So did most of the rest of the press. These guys were heroes … I knew, of course, about some very shaky marriages, some womanizing, some drinking, and never reported it. The guys wouldn’t have let me, and neither would NASA.”
It wasn’t so much that these things happened, because they happen everywhere, in every occupation, in every part of the world. What made them uncomfortable was the Boy Scout image that NASA sought to project. And I know that at this point I should ask whether Charlie succumbed, but I can’t bring myself to pick over such old wounds, should they exist.
I ask Charlie if he enjoyed the reunion at the Reno Air Races and he says yes, it was nice to see the guys and they were treated well and there “weren’t too many people bugging you.” Which isn’t how it looked to me at all. He’s still interested in space, but doesn’t campaign the way Buzz does.
“I mean, Buzz has some real far-out ideas,” he says, quickly adding, “some good ideas.”
The settlement of Earth-crossing asteroids being my current favourite.
We talk about Jim Irwin and Ed Mitchell, others who had big experiences up there, both of whom were Lunar Module pilots like Charlie. In fact, Ed acted as his backup on Apollo 16, so the two got to know each other well.
“Ed’s more of a New Ager, I call it,” explains Dotty, keen to distance herself from that version of spirituality. “It’s spiritual, but it’s not really the Holy Spirit, so much as ESP and cognitive stuff.”
It turns out that Charlie was aboard the noetics bus for a while.
“Yeah, after Ed left the space programme, he convinced me that this was all real and maybe I oughtta try it on my flight, so I was planning on doing that, but I was so tired that I could never concentrate, so never did anything with it. Ed then started this Institute of Noetics out in San Francisco, and it was basically to scientifically prove the existence of God.”
